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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?

#281

Post by crpatino »

merpnderp wrote: post #276
crpatino wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a fact that conventional oil has already peaked, sometime in the last 5-10 years. Shale oil, tar sands and the like are picking up part of the slack, though their EROI is lower (though still a little better than renewables) and have a bunch of other technical and environmental issues. At some point we'll have to bite that bullet. The problem with your remark was caused by the doomers who took the flag of Peak O…

You say doomers took the flag to claim everything is going to crash, but then say we should be in a crash course to change off of oil. Yet we have several decades of known oil reserves, maybe dozens, with room to grow usage. And given the rapid pace of EV cars, the market is going to solve the oil problem far faster than any mandated crash problem, well within the dozens of years of oil reserves we have left are exha…

It takes decades to retool the whole industry. Inventing new forms of energy is just the begining, you have to make those available in wide scale. Whole new industries have to be born and old industries have to be let fade and die.

It is not that the house is on fire right now. It is that we live in a house with no fire alarm and not up to code, but everybody is dragging their feet to fix that because "it has never happened before".

And since you mention EV cars... where do you think the electricity to power them is comming today? What percentage comes from non-reneweable sources? And what percentage of the car market lives near the bigger sources of reneweable sources?

Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?

#282

Post by jerf »

jacobolus wrote: post #215
jerf wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Funny enough, there’s a link at the top of Bret’s essay here to an article describing how the community/movement excited about “effective altruism” has gone off the deep end worrying about the singularity and strong AI (not to mention proselytizing / self promotion) while ignoring more obvious concerns like poverty or climate change. http://www.vox.com/2015/8/10/9124145/effective-altruism-glob... > Effective altruism…

I cut a discussion from my post about how I tend to actually philosophically deeply disagree with them, lest I sidetrack the conversation pointlessly. Despite my disagreements, and the fact I might value things somewhat differently than them, I broadly appreciate their taking time to analyze various charities for their effectiveness. Even if abstractly imperfect, and even if I would rate things somewhat differently, they're still gathering useful data that I think can go a long ways towards ensuring that you aren't just pissing into the wind and that your donations are having a real effect.

Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?

#283

Post by agilebyte »

greggman wrote: post #261

I'll probably get downvoted but I'm honestly interested in some thoughts on my dumb thinking. This is an amazing presentation and I've loved Bret Victor's other presentations but, and I'm making an assumption here, I kind of assume he's rich or at least financially independent given where he's worked and when he worked there. Assuming I'm right I find it a little hard to listen to the advice which sometimes sounds li…

Maybe don't think of it in terms of chasing worthy causes or not, in absolute terms. Calculate how much income do you need to secure your retirement that you mention and then be prepared to spend the rest of the income or time (resources) on the chasing.

Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?

#284

Post by yongjik »

ommunist wrote: post #256
yongjik wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're bringing up the Toba eruption (circa 71,000BP!), probably the largest eruption in the past 100 thousand years, which was so extreme that some scholars suspect that it created a "genetic bottleneck" in human DNA by killing off the majority of humans.[1] According to your list, it emitted 494.24 Mt of carbon. By comparison: "Since 1751 approximately 374 billion metric tonnes of carbon have been released to th…

Unfortunately there is no magic fingerprint to distinguish between tectonic, volcanic and antropogenic carbon. The thing is that there are about 130 000 intraplate volcanoes leaking co2 to the ocean all the time. And it is very probable that the whole human output to carbon release during the whole industrial history is less than carbon input of the Pacific Ridge in just 10 years. Another thing is that over the last…

> Unfortunately there is no magic fingerprint to distinguish between tectonic, volcanic and antropogenic carbon.

Wrong again. Fossil fuels come from plants and animals, and they all ultimately come from photosynthesis, which prefers C12 over slightly heavier C13 atoms.[1]

As a result, CO2 emitted by burning fossil fuels have a lower concentration of C13.

"Plants have a lower C13/C12 ratio than in the atmosphere. If rising atmospheric CO2 comes fossil fuels, the C13/C12 should be falling. Indeed this is what is occuring (Ghosh 2003) and the trend correlates with the trend in global emissions."[2]

As for "humanity is smaller", I'll refer to the excellent xkcd[3]. I believe no further elaboration is necessary.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopic_signature#Carbon_isot...

[2] http://www.skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=109

[3] http://xkcd.com/1338/

Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?

#285

Post by Zach_the_Lizard »

greggman wrote: post #247
Zach_the_Lizard wrote: post #99

The best you can do is lobby for denser development and ending the rules that force a suburban character. Suburbs are more wasteful than cities. Riding a bike to work generates less pollution than a car. Buildings themselves are more efficiently insulated when it's 100 units on a block vs. 100 single family homes on 50 acres. Deliveries can use more efficient and less polluting forms of transport, such as rail, more…

How do you convince the supposedly "green" SF population that SF should really look more like Hong Kong?

It doesn't have to look like Hong Kong. Paris isn't as dense as Manhattan, but it's something like 2/3rds as dense despite relatively few tall buildings. SF could allow mid-rise European style development and grow quite a bit denser.

If SF had Parisian density, it could fit something like 2.5 million people. Other places in the bay could also not make suburban living mandatory.

Housing affordability and environmental problems are a national issue. IMO the best solution is a Federal law that makes it impossible for cities to mandate suburban living. That avoids the problem where one city liberalizes land use and then sees huge development while others keep their doors closed.

Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?

#286

Post by brenschluss »

VanillaLime wrote: post #260
brenschluss wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Caring basically is money, be it in the form of concrete donations, donations of time, or anything else that money can be converted into. This is not just a laughably simplistic statement, but a sinister one, as it's the flawed axiom on which you justify your moral self-exoneration from feeling the need to do anything. But let's take your logic even further. Because of economies of scale and the powers of compound…

I really recommend you read about the Effective Altruism movement if you want a detailed response to your questions. In response to your question, you are totally right! Anything you can do for most of these problems will probably be completely meaningless compared to the scale of the problem. Almost certainly, the rational decision is to do nothing. So what? The entire idea of altruism is that you make an economical…

> If he instead simply worked for those same hours and earned $100 an hour, he could pay 10 people to work at the same soup kitchen and help 10 times as many homeless. That's the kind of tradeoff you don't think about if you don't realize that money is fungible with regard to caring.

A statement that 'money is fungible with regards to caring' ignores the network effects that happens when money becomes prioritized, like a version of the Jevons paradox, in which a relative efficiency in coal resulted in an absolute increase in coal consumption.

Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?

#287

Post by snowwrestler »

criddell wrote: post #280
snowwrestler wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The infrastructure of human society was built for the condition ranges of a certain climate. The current global warming trend is seen as bad right now because a) it's taking us outside that range, and b) it's preventable. Purposefully cooling us outside that range would also be bad, albeit in different ways.

Well, the planet was always going to heat up, it's just that we've accelerated the process.

Not sure that's true. We seem to be on the cooling leg of a Milankovitch cycle, and the sun's energy output is not easily predicted on century time-scales. I mean, eventually it will swell up and toast the Earth, but that's a long time from now.

The rate of change matters too, because people do migrate and refresh their infrastructure. If the rate of change is equal to, or less than, our migration and infrastructure rates, then we can adapt without much additional cost or social strife. Right now, it's predicted to be quite a bit faster. Edit: because of our own activities that are causing warming.

Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?

#288

Post by criddell »

snowwrestler wrote: post #287
criddell wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the planet was always going to heat up, it's just that we've accelerated the process.

Not sure that's true. We seem to be on the cooling leg of a Milankovitch cycle, and the sun's energy output is not easily predicted on century time-scales. I mean, eventually it will swell up and toast the Earth, but that's a long time from now. The rate of change matters too, because people do migrate and refresh their infrastructure. If the rate of change is equal to, or less than, our migration and infrastructure…

More recent studies suggest that current heating, with or without human C02 outputs, would continue for the next 50,000 years.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/297/5585/1287

Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?

#289

Post by jsingleton »

Pxtl wrote: post #81

I'm disappointed that the one item most accessible to the software/consumer-electronics world: telecommuting, doesn't appear much in the article. Giving people the tools to properly manage a remote team (including non-experts that are unaccustomed to remoting) is something we can do and that will take commuters off the roads.

It's touched upon at the end of transportation, but only briefly.

'As for airplanes, people might just have to fly less [0]. This will require better tools for remote collaboration, or in Saul Griffith’s words, “Make video conferencing not suck.” [1]'

I've used video conferencing that doesn't suck and it was great. It was half a board room with a row of huge monitors down the 'centre' (far wall) and half a table against them.

It really felt like people were on the other side of the table and not on the other side of the planet. This also opens up augmented reality possibilities like tagging people with their names.

[0] http://www.withouthotair.com/c5/page_35.shtml

[1] http://longnow.org/seminars/02015/sep/21/infrastructure-and-...

Re: What can a technologist do about climate change?

#290

Post by personomas »

IanDrake wrote: post #233
personomas wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Listen to God, and he'll tell you what to do! Anyways, many "epic" problems are caused by our own sin: hate crimes, war, homelessness, gender inequality, etc, etc. Our sin is the cause of these problems. Not only sin found else where in the world, but our sin. So here's a starting point: love thy neighbor as thy self, read the bible with your heart, and rejoice for Jesus died for our sins! Finally, love God! And all…

I'm not sure why you're getting down voted. You're viewpoint is just as sane as the guy a few comments above (grenzbegriff) who thinks a lot about what he can do, but is too busy making sure he never again needs to work a day in his life. Heart warming stuff. As an atheist who is in the middle of listening to 90 hours of the King James bible, I think you should listen to the bible with your ears, not your heart. If y…

Yeah, it's pretty disappointing that this community would reject a genuine opinion that has merit.

I assume that this has been rejected for two reasons: 1) They don't believe in God, which is too bad, and I pray for them who down vote me that they make it to heaven, because in hell the fire never goes out [0]. 2) They reject the idea that their sins effect other people, which is also too bad, and they don't want to take responsibility for their own actions. People from #2 may be the same ones from #1 and vice-versa.

You should read the bible with an open mind. Society in days of the coming of Israel was uncivil and ruthless, and it required rules and laws in order to remove the evil. Without it, we wouldn't have the same peace and harmony that we have today.

As for the women being raped, I think you're referring to this [1] which goes something like: a man meets a virgin -- who has pledged to marry a man whom is not this man -- rapes her, but the women could have prevented it if she cries for help, then they're both guilty. This is the right decision because the women let this man have sex with her, and then later denounced as rape. That is why they're both sinful.

If this wasn't clearing from reading that verse, it's clear from the very next verse Deuteronomy 22:25-26 that says that if a man rapes a women in the country whose screams are not heard, then she is not at fault because just nobody was there to save her.

For all the other things you mention, I'd be happy to explain to you likewise, if you point something out specifically.

Often, people who reject the bible are looking for rules & laws that conform with their beliefs, but their beliefs can be corrupted and blinded by evil. The word of God & Jesus is truth, and it's a word of love and wisdom and to those accept Him will see his glory.

God led the people out of a darkness and slavery to freedom and glory. He said to the people of Israel: "Do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand." --Isaiah 41:10.

[0] Mark 9:43 http://www.biblestudytools.com/mark/9-43.html

[1] Deuteronomy 22:23-24 https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy+22%...

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