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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

#281

Post by DasIch »

s_q_b wrote: post #207
nl wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 E…

Nuclear reactors aren't economical, don't scale well, can't be deployed everywhere and it takes forever to build them.

Even if everyone would agree to convert everything to nuclear reactors now it would probably take a decade before the first goes online and several decades until enough of them are online. That's far too long.

In that same period you can easily get far more energy quicker with decentralized renewables.

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

#282

Post by balabaster »

at-fates-hands wrote: post #280
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.

>> Some combination of green energy sources plus probably very large scale terraforming. The Achilles heel in all of this is how to make green energy affordable. If you want to really make impact, making these technologies affordable for lower income and the poor is the best way to reduce energy consumption. Unfortunately, a lot of these technologies are still way way way out of reach of these people to take part in.…

Last I saw stats, something like 57% of the U.S. is officially living in poverty. Trying to afford anything more than the necessities of life isn't going to happen on an individual basis for them, so it'll need to be a state/federal level effort to provide them with that.

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

#283

Post by bane »

arethuza wrote: post #244
bane wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in a latitude about the same as Spain, Southern Italy, Greece and Turkey, but in my part of the U.S., it's been above 30 degrees Centigrade for a few weeks, with high humidity. Our winters also get around 0 Centigrade (+- 8 or 9 degrees) pretty regularly, so we need to supply both heating and cooling. Usually when it gets above 24/25 C we start to really put on the air conditioning. And below 20 C we put on th…

"And below 20 C we put on the heat." I'm pretty sure we don't put our heating on here in Edinburgh until October when nights are probably getting to be well below 10C. Mind you for me 10C is "comfortable", 15C is "warm", 20C is "hot" and 30C means I'm on holiday somewhere hot where I can go capsizing to stay cool.

There's definitely an element of being locally acclimatized. I remember spending some time in the desert, finally got used to the hot temperature when December rolled around. I was freezing all the time and finally checked the thermostat, 19 C.

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

#284

Post by brbrodude »

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…

Truisms.

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

#286

Post by blahi »

fsloth wrote: post #270
blahi wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 scientific community could not possibly hope to have a definite answer to that." Do I take that by your logic we should not even try to understand the environment? Since definitive answers are not possible, and if the current expert's opinion is not sufficient, then I fail to see what argument could possibly be of any higher quality. "Hard liners on "man-made" climate change are sponsored through various channel…

No, it sounds like balanced opinions are always better than radical opinions. Radicals are almost always wrong and always unproductive.

And to answer your other question, environmental NGOs have plenty to do with atmospheric research. They publicize it some of it. They fund some of it. They use some of it as a political lever.

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

#287

Post by dredmorbius »

barkbro wrote: post #226
_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.

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.

We've got a really good storage medium for energy.

Liquid and gaseous hydrocarbons.

They can be synthesised, in a carbon-neutral fashion.

Other storage methods, including batteries, molten salt (thermal), and CAES are likely to also be used. But there are some things for which bulk liquid fuel still wins.

There's over 50 years of research into it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28nqoz/electri...

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

#288

Post by mseebach »

bsdetector wrote: post #273
mseebach wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The question becomes if the taxes are raised high enough to actually impact or reverse climate change, will people abide by them? If it costs $100/day to heat your home in the winter are you going to pay that or buy black market kerosene or just chop down a tree and burn it when no government inspector is around? There's a limit to how much can be done with taxes.

First, there's no evidence that the carbon tax would have to be so high to be effective - $7-20/ton[1], probably increasing over time. US emissions per person is the world highest at 16.5 tons -- that's several hundred dollars per year, not day.

Second, the revenue from the carbon tax should be fed back to the people by lowering other taxes. It should be net-zero on the government budget. The point is to create a clear and simple incentive across the board to switch to low-carbon behaviour, not to raise revenues.

Third, nobody promised this would be a quick fix, but nothing is at the moment. But re-jiggering the economy to give a clear incentive is a good start, and even at $7/ton, reducing carbon becomes a multi-billion dollar industry overnight.

1: http://www.carbontax.org/blog/2008/10/18/a-question-of-balan...

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

#290

Post by legulere »

goodmachine wrote: post #204
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 enshro…

It would also trigger a famine and lead to extremely bad air quality.
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