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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

#341

Post by gambiting »

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.

I'm in Newcastle and I'll probably have heating on next month - basically the lowest I let my home temperature drop to naturally is ~17C, then I put the heating on, set to 19C.

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

#342

Post by Oletros »

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…

> Regulation has never fixed anything. And especially when it comes to science, we need to remember that innovation and regulation are opposite ends of the same spectrum.

One word, CFC

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

#343

Post by izzydata »

lukeschlather wrote: post #329
tomp wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 m…

Is that really a fair comparison though? If the United States managed to become as populated as China it wouldn't have the luxury / potential to use as much energy per person as it does now and would become more like China.

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

#344

Post by Oletros »

mikeash wrote: post #318
Retric wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suppose net CO2 went up on average by 1ppm per thousand years by natural causes. Well, over the last 2 billion years 2,000,000,000 / 1,000 * 1= 1,000,000 ppm. 2,000,000 ppm wait part per million so 2 parts per part that's meaningless. Thus, net CO2 from natural causes must average very close to 0 on long time scales. PS: If you look into it natural carbon sequestration increases slightly as atmospheric CO2 increase w…

You can also come at it from the other direction: look at how much CO2 humans have released over the past century or so, look at how much more CO2 is in the atmosphere, and compare. I looked this up a while ago and as I recall the result was that about half of humanity's CO2 production was being absorbed somewhere, and about half of it is still around and accounts for the increase in atmospheric CO2. Which is to say,…

> Which is to say, the natural net contribution to CO2 in the atmosphere is negative

What?

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

#345

Post by gambiting »

dredmorbius wrote: post #303
Roritharr wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You also have to keep in mind that it's this expensive because it's not done on a huge scale. If it was, the cost would very likely be much much lower than the quoted $150.

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

#346

Post by Oletros »

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?

I live near Barcelona, those days the temperature reaches 27-28C.

We don't put the AC, we open the balcony door and the air current is enough.

In winter, we reach at most 5C, we don't put also the heating. Some neighbors have it very high and in our apartment the temperature is 20-21C.

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

#347

Post by mikeash »

tombert wrote: post #76
harryh wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even with your slightly lower footprint due to not owning a car you still have a much larger footprint than the world mean. Probably 2-3x. So there are billions of people being "punished" for what you're doing.

Well, considering that I get my power from a combination of Nuclear and wind power, I doubt that I give a particularly high carbon footprint. But you're not wrong, I almost certainly have a higher footprint than most of the third world. I guess what I was getting at is that I think the levels New York has are substantially more sustainable than the rest of the US. Sorry for the confusion.

Don't forget to include the chemical energy you use to run your body in your figure for "my power." The impact from agriculture is pretty substantial.

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

#348

Post by undersuit »

izzydata wrote: post #339

No wonder my electricity bill was so insane. Maybe this winter will be the coldest winter ever recorded.

It could be the hottest January on record. Seeing as half the world is experiencing winter right now, what do you think will happen to global temperatures when the southern hemisphere experiences their summer?

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

#349

Post by humanrebar »

snarfy wrote: post #115
konschubert wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you trying to say?

That the problem is there are too many people in a world of finite resources. A solution is less people. I'm not suggesting how this is done, but we probably shouldn't e.g. subsidize growth anymore. You shouldn't get a tax break for having kids. It should go the other way.

> You shouldn't get a tax break for having kids.

Fair enough. Then people should pay more in taxes than they receive in health and pension benefits. Right now, American retirees on average get more in benefits than they paid in taxes. The only way that works is if we have continual population and productivity growth, meaning we need to incentivize kids or we need to stop retiring and getting sick so much.

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

#350

Post by losteverything »

harryh wrote: post #278
losteverything wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't like the word "punished" in this climate context.

I don't either. Hence my use of scare quotes.

I think you and i share a similar line of thought. I'm trying to rack my brain (and contribute something) as when (other eras) in history has the "regard of future generations" cause for such debate or action like this one.

Nobody can predict if another person's life will be better if "x" happens. This is a foundation of suicide prevention.

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