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

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

#301

Post by tomp » Tue, Aug 23, 2016, 2:44 PM UTC

caseysoftware wrote: post #296

Angostura wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If my bath is overflowing, the only water I have to worry about is the relatively small volume coming over the edge - not the total amount of water in the bath. The ecosystem produces vast amounts of CO2 ... and consumes a similarly vast amount. It is the imbalance that you need to worry about. And that imbalance is largely caused by humans either damaging CO2 sinks or releasing CO2 that ha been sequestered over the…

To continue your analogy: if the goal is to stop the overflow, then we should probably see what the contributors are. If the faucet is on and your kid is dropping pennies in, both are contributing to the overflow but stopping your kid is going to be irrelevant. Do we know which humans are?

Can you substantiate your thesis a bit? I.e. explain where the CO2 that the nature is (allegedly) producing is coming from?

For humans, it's pretty simple: we're burning the oil on the timescale of centuries that the nature has been storing on the timescale of billions of years. For nature, the longest CO2 cycle is at most a multiple of the longest life-span (~500 years), and there's no indication that the cycle has changed (i.e. that suddenly more trees are burning in natural fires than have for the past few millenia).

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

#302

Post by iofj » Tue, Aug 23, 2016, 2:44 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…

Only if also levied on imports in a reasonable way, otherwise it will have the opposite effect. Why ? Because China and all of cheap Asia runs on coal, and that's not going to change quickly.

If it is not levied on imports, it is probably better to actually subsidize domestic CO2 production, because it is better and more useful (more useful work/more industrial production) than having that energy in China, and even China is better than the cheapest parts of Asia (Bangladesh, for example).

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

#303

Post by dredmorbius » Tue, Aug 23, 2016, 2:46 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.

Costs of carbon sequestration range from about $20 to $70 per tonne, as part of exhaust capture (CCS). For direct capture from the atmosphere, values are closer to $150/tonne.

The world is dumping 38 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere every year. (I'll ignore the additional gigatonnes we've already committed.)

That's $2.6 trillion per year for sequestration, just to stay even. (The value's actually lower than I'd expected.)

For comparison, global GDP is about $70 trillion, so this is 3% of global GDP.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/carbon-dioxide-emissions-rise-to...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sequestration

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

#304

Post by tomp » Tue, Aug 23, 2016, 2:46 PM UTC

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.

The problem isn't price. The problem is consistency. Nuclear is a complete (day & night) power solution. Solar/wind isn't.

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

#305

Post by tomp » Tue, Aug 23, 2016, 2:50 PM UTC

dredmorbius wrote: post #287

barkbro wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

And no production prototype?

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

#306

Post by mseebach » Tue, Aug 23, 2016, 2:52 PM UTC

realityking wrote: post #222

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…

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.

Chopping down and burning a tree would incur the carbon tax, so the idea would be that this would incentivise you to plant a new tree.

Perhaps planting a tree should incur a negative carbon tax.

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

#307

Post by gnaritas » Tue, Aug 23, 2016, 2:54 PM UTC

nilved wrote: post #195

Retric wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The least safe new car in 2016 is vastly safer than the absolute best car produced in 1980. Remember, seat belts are a direct result of regulation mostly from US airforce testing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stapp

That doesn't matter unless you're arguing that it wouldn't have happened without a government and regulation. Most of the responsibilities of a government would be better handled and implemented by the private sector.

You are blinded by your ideology, it's making you ignorant to the truths that everyone else clearly sees.

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

#308

Post by fsloth » Tue, Aug 23, 2016, 2:55 PM UTC

blahi wrote: post #286

fsloth wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Are there any links between NGO "environmental fud" and IPCC federated results that would point out stronger political rather than scientific drivers for the results?

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

#309

Post by iofj » Tue, Aug 23, 2016, 2:55 PM UTC

Angostura wrote: post #231

caseysoftware wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean "If you reduce CO2 production by 90% by humans " The analysis that I'm waiting to see is "of the global CO2 production each year, how much of it is due to humans?" If we contribute 90% of CO2 production, then reducing it may change things. If we contribute 10% of CO2 production, then even reducing our portion to zero, the overall change is near-negligible.

If my bath is overflowing, the only water I have to worry about is the relatively small volume coming over the edge - not the total amount of water in the bath. The ecosystem produces vast amounts of CO2 ... and consumes a similarly vast amount. It is the imbalance that you need to worry about. And that imbalance is largely caused by humans either damaging CO2 sinks or releasing CO2 that ha been sequestered over the…

CO2 production will stop. We are at or over the Hubbert peak, and nothing can stop co2 production from falling in the future. Therefore, no policies are necessary to make it happen, and anything you do do is counterproductive at best, sabotage at worst.

The ecosystem is bounded by co2 in the air. Proof : just see what happens to plants if you put them in a co2 rich environment. The ecosystem is expanding to eat the extra CO2, and it will win, guaranteed. Especially since we won't even try to stop it. The amounts of land area that are turning green in Africa and Asia are mind-bogglingly big.

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

#310

Post by caseysoftware » Tue, Aug 23, 2016, 2:56 PM UTC

tomp wrote: post #301

caseysoftware wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To continue your analogy: if the goal is to stop the overflow, then we should probably see what the contributors are. If the faucet is on and your kid is dropping pennies in, both are contributing to the overflow but stopping your kid is going to be irrelevant. Do we know which humans are?

Can you substantiate your thesis a bit? I.e. explain where the CO2 that the nature is (allegedly) producing is coming from? For humans, it's pretty simple: we're burning the oil on the timescale of centuries that the nature has been storing on the timescale of billions of years. For nature, the longest CO2 cycle is at most a multiple of the longest life-span (~500 years), and there's no indication that the cycle has…

According to the EPA:

"While CO2 emissions come from a variety of natural sources, human-related emissions are responsible for the increase that has occurred in the atmosphere since the industrial revolution."

Ref: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/overview-greenhouse-gases (on the carbon dioxide tab)

And the Energy Information Association goes on to include magnitudes here:

http://www.eia.gov/oiaf/1605/archive/gg04rpt/pdf/tbl3.pdf

If those numbers are accurate, humans contribute 0.2% of CO2 and 60% of methane. So my follow up is: Which gas is a worse contributor? Because we can greatly influence one of those.