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

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

#321

Post by chr1 » Tue, Aug 23, 2016, 3:07 PM UTC

CydeWeys wrote: post #277

chr1 wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what i was thinking ~15 years ago, but now it is painful for me to remember that i could seriously support such an idea. Environmental friendly matters only because it is human friendly. Removing all the humans is not environmental friendly since climate change and extinctions happen a lot without humans too. Reducing number of people to half the current population is not environmental friendly since we were…

I'm with you on everything except for this part: > Higher sea level is not a problem, it gives more water to create lakes and fill aquifers in places like Sahara, Iran, and central Asia. Higher sea level is absolutely a problem, as it disproportionately takes away the most valuable, economically productive, and inhabited land, and causes huge refugee crises. There's no shortage of seawater. Everything you mentioned c…

You are right, I should've said slowly raising. If we let it to actually rise and flood cities it would be indeed a catastrophe, but the perspective of raising sea can incentivize richer countries to invest into moving that water somewhere else.

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

#322

Post by davidf18 » Tue, Aug 23, 2016, 3:08 PM UTC

melling wrote: post #266

davidf18 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Battery technology is improving significantly.

Can you quantify "significantly"? That's one of those words people throw around to make a point without making a real point. Are we talking 20%, 100%, 300%. And whatever the number, is it sufficient? Also, what's the timeline? A decade?

https://evannex.com/blogs/news/18110144-battery-costs-fallin...

https://evannex.com/blogs/news/34327493-battery-costs-fallin...

"Most recently, Tesla landed a 500MWh grid storage deal with Advanced Microgrid Solutions‬. And, outside the U.S., others have taken notice. Italy's Enel Green Power SpA announced it will partner with Tesla for 1.5-3MWh battery storage, and, Ireland's Gaelectric Group entered into an agreement with Tesla Motors to build a 1 MW demonstration utility-scale project."

[there are hyperlinks in the original paragraph]

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

#323

Post by mikeash » Tue, Aug 23, 2016, 3:08 PM UTC

tomp wrote: post #304

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.

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

Energy storage solves that problem. The technology exists, the only potential trouble is cost, so it comes back to price again. Storage costs are also dropping rapidly. A proper comparison of nuclear to wind/solar needs to account for the cost of storage as well, but even if you add that in I suspect it's approaching parity.

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

#324

Post by orangecat » Tue, Aug 23, 2016, 3:09 PM UTC

sanxiyn wrote: post #185

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.

Indeed, it is amazing how quickly things are changing. If we solve intermittency, there won't be any reason to be pro-nuclear.

If. Meanwhile as long as we are burning any amount of coal, we should be building nuclear plants as fast as possible, and we should have been doing that for the last 30 years. The fact that so-called "environmentalists" made that impossible due to their incessant FUD is why I hold them much more responsible for our current situation than Exxon.

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

#325

Post by mikeash » Tue, Aug 23, 2016, 3:15 PM UTC

oliv__ wrote: post #62

redwood wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to agree: you can't go "back to nature" when you have 8 billion people running around, a larger and larger portion of which want to live like those of us in developing countries do (especially in the basic sense of having AC to escape this increasing heat). AC is a great little allegory for the whole thing... would you rather have AC and deal with hotter and hotter days, or forego AC and wait a century, have n…

Before AC, did people not live without it?

Many died. Even today, it's common for hundreds or thousands to die during heat waves. Today, it's people who are too poor to afford air conditioning. Before, it would have hit many more.

Those who didn't die were also far less productive. In many climates, living without air conditioning means spending much of the day simply surviving the heat, not getting anything done.

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

#326

Post by chr1 » Tue, Aug 23, 2016, 3:15 PM UTC

WDCDev wrote: post #109

snarfy wrote: post #78

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There is another solution: less people.

The good news is that global populations will begin to decline over the next 100 years!

That is assuming humans will live 80 years like they do now. Hopefully in next 100 years we'll figure out a way to increase human lifespan enough to keep exponential growth of total population. (Some people believe that it is possible http://www.sens.org/)

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

#327

Post by yongjik » Tue, Aug 23, 2016, 3:17 PM UTC

sounds wrote: post #252

bad_user wrote: post #209

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The problem is that costs are subsidized by basically letting businesses destroy the environment. The solution should be simple: add lots of taxes, let the off-the-shelf cost of meat and gasoline reflect the real cost to our environment, make deforestation a crime, tax the shit out of all polluting industries and if a country is not participating add taxes on imports from said country, or ban those imports altogether…

Great suggestions! We've basically imposed the "taxes on imports from said country, or ban those imports" on North Korea, with the result that they use the worst of environmental practices: • Inefficient small coal-burning fireplaces in outlying areas. (Pyongyang is better.) • Regulatory environment where factory and vehicle emissions are not even close to a priority. • Unsafe nuclear testing. Ok, so that was my stra…

1. According to Wikipedia, North Korea emits 3.0t CO2 per capita as of 2011. US emits 17.0t per capita. One could almost make the claim that economic sanction is working. :/

2. The problem is to change the behavior of billions of people, and many will find it inconvenient (to varying degrees). Of course it's gonna be political. These days I end up regarding anyone proposing "de-politicization" with suspicion, because "getting the politics out of it" is a great way to ensure that whatever solution we can apply is delayed by years.

3. The same for geoengineering. I know some people are sincere, but in many cases it sounds too much like "There must be a unicorn technology that will solve the problem without us paying the price. If it's not there yet, we just have to wish it harder."

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

#328

Post by tomp » Tue, Aug 23, 2016, 3:20 PM UTC

caseysoftware wrote: post #310

tomp wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/gg04rp…

But "source" of CO2 is meaningless without the other column, "absorbtion". Obviously nature produces CO2 (e.g. by animals and plants breathing), and CO2 isn't a problem by itself. The problem is the increase of CO2, i.e. the delta between production and absorbtion. That 0.2% of human CO2 surplus turns into 20% increase over a 100 years. That's the problem, not the production/absorbtion/cycling of CO2 itself. And that part, AFAIK, is all human-made!

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

#329

Post by lukeschlather » Tue, Aug 23, 2016, 3:20 PM UTC

tomp wrote: post #297

sounds wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great suggestions! We've basically imposed the "taxes on imports from said country, or ban those imports" on North Korea, with the result that they use the worst of environmental practices: • Inefficient small coal-burning fireplaces in outlying areas. (Pyongyang is better.) • Regulatory environment where factory and vehicle emissions are not even close to a priority. • Unsafe nuclear testing. Ok, so that was my stra…

> Many countries lack the internal political will to put meaningful environmental clean ups in place. Even something as simple as the tax you proposed to pay for environmental clean up of disaster areas is impossible due to politics. The point isn't changing other countries. The point is giving competing green technologies a fighting chance. I don't care whether Saudi Arabia suffocates in cheap oil or builds a hi-tec…

The point where your narrative breaks down somewhat is that when you look at pollution per capita, the US is far worse than China. This is even without accounting for the fact that most of the benefits of Chinese pollution, if there are benefits, end up in the USA.

China's population is 4.3 times that of the USA, but they only burn 1.3 times as much coal. In other words, the average American burns nearly 4 times as much coal as the average Chinese person.

http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Energy/Coal/C...

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

#330

Post by chr1 » Tue, Aug 23, 2016, 3:22 PM UTC

hellofunk wrote: post #293

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 disagree. There are advanced cultures in the world without this ambition you speak of (I'm looking at you, Holland), where convenient life in a local environment that is all accessible by bike, eating lots of fish, and caring less about immense wealth and impressions and more about quality of life.. it is attainable.

And the coolest thing about Holland is that they are one of first to do terraforming on a large scale by creating a local environment under the sea level!