OK, but... any ideas how can we solve that?
Make telecommuting and carpooling/ridesharing the new normal.
Less commutes == less emissions.
July was the hottest month ever recorded, according to Nasa
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Re: July was the hottest month ever recorded, according to Nasa
#352Personally 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.
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…
"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.
"
This will either lead to: your country (and many countries) becoming a massive failure or war.
Leading people isn't done solely by smacking people repeatedly and saying "no don't do that", or taking money out of their pockets every time they do.
This mechanism doesn't work if you do it to everyone, and in fact, if you look at oppressive governments, even they tend to have at least one class of people who can do whatever they want or are paid well or whatever, and use that class to keep others in line.
Leadership instead is often convincing people to be dragged along with you in a direction they may not want to go. It has to actually be palatable to people to do so.
There are other problems. What makes you think people won't emigrate to the places which don't do this crazy plan? What makes you think the leaders of those places won't end up with tons of power because they have a near-unlimited set of people who want to live there, tons of money, and a happy populace?
If they gang up with other countries, what makes you think they won't just take over your country, and if you've pissed off the populace enough, that your populace won't want that to happen?
This "simple" solution just ignores all the politics, etc involved, because it thinks they don't matter. But they do.
Re: July was the hottest month ever recorded, according to Nasa
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rather than eyeballing it, why not do a proper regression? To me, it looks like a line going up from 1900 with a bump in 1940. But you don't have to take my word for it, there's piles and piles of data out there.
I'm not denying that the world has been heating up since 1900. I'm saying that during the last ca. 36 years it is suddenly going very much faster than it did before.
World CO2 emissions in 2014 were about 9.8 gigatonnes. The current concentration of atmospheric CO2 is about 400 parts per million. In 1980, the relevant figures were about 5.3 gigatonnes and 340ppm.
We've got the accelerator to the floor. It's no wonder that we're getting all the speeding tickets now.
Re: July was the hottest month ever recorded, according to Nasa
#354Earlier 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…
Unfortunately, nuclear has one big issue in addition to the issues already described (long time to build a plant; geo-political concerns on the link between plants and atomic weapons): when it goes bad, it can go spectacularly wrong. No other power source has produced a singular disaster like Chernobyl where about 2500 square km of land is basically uninhabitable for a few hundred years+. Coal fires are the only thing that come close.
For that reason, the NIMBY forces / politics against nuclear are much stronger than average (both in building the plant and storing the waste). Never mind that, on average, nuclear power is much safer than fossil fuels. People fear the spectacular more than the mundane. Take terrorism vs. car crashes, in the Western world you're more likely to die in a car crash by far, but it's terrorism that stirs up the fears.
As far as global warming is concerned, power generation is only part of the puzzle anyways. Such contributors as transportation and deforestation are also important. Honestly, solar and wind are pretty competitive right now... except for one angle. The main problem with solar / wind / etc. energy generation right now is variability, so the real "moonshot" for this technology is energy storage. (Which is the same real issue with electric transport as well).
Re: July was the hottest month ever recorded, according to Nasa
#355OK, but... any ideas how can we solve that?
Make telecommuting and carpooling/ridesharing the new normal. Less commutes == less emissions.
If you somehow cut personal transportation of all kinds to zero in the US, you'd cut total GHG emissions by about 13%. Nothing to sneeze at, but it won't solve the problem by a long shot.
Re: July was the hottest month ever recorded, according to Nasa
#356Personally 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 agree that technology in terms of energy supply will be important, but is terraforming really a sensible option? Given how little we understand the climate, trying to manipulate it in this way feels like a very risky manoevre. And there are big problems here in terms of externalities: my 'improved' climate might be disaster for you.
That depends on what you mean by terraforming. If it is use nuclear bombs to cause huge volcano eruption, it is obviously stupid, but if it is using mirror to heat up air behind the cyclone makes it dissolve or change route, it's a great idea we should try. And we'll learn a lot about the climate in the process.
> my 'improved' climate might be disaster for you.
People tend to like the same kind of climate, so it will be disaster mostly for white bears and desert lizards. Of course it's possible that someone tries to improve climate in his location, by making it worse in other places, but that is not a risk introduced by terraforming.
Re: July was the hottest month ever recorded, according to Nasa
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 agreeme…
That article is over a year old. It sounds like slow progress, which is nice. However, given the timeline, I don't expect electric vehicles to be significant for at least another decade.
Re: July was the hottest month ever recorded, according to Nasa
#358I own a home built in the 1960s in the northeast US. My home (like many others, I'm sure) uses an oil-fired boiler to provide heating and hot water. I don't have gas lines to my house. The gas company won't run them unless I pay ~$5,000 for them to do so. Even if my home used natural gas instead of oil, I feel like it's not really solving the problem.
What are my options here? Is solar viable? What can _I_ reasonably do to improve consumption? I use only LED lighting, eat meat rarely, use a programmable thermostat, have new windows/doors, etc. Improving the situation seems either not economically viable for most people or an incremental improvement. Just wait?
Re: July was the hottest month ever recorded, according to Nasa
#359It looks like the actual increase was minimal and within the margin of error: NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced this week that according to their calculations, July 2015 was the hottest month since instrumental records began in 1880. NOAA says that the record was set by eight one-hundredths of a degree Celsius over that set in July 1998. NASA calculates that July 2015 beat…
Are we supposed to ignore the established long-term warming trend just because the records now being set aren't sufficiently beyond the ones from one anomalous year?
Re: July was the hottest month ever recorded, according to Nasa
#360It never ceases to bewilder me that nuclear power isn't taken seriously as a replacement for fossil-burning baseload generation.
...particularly when there are tens of thousands of warheads that can be re-purposed.
Megatons-to-megawatts is the closest modern equivalent of swords-to-plowshares; it's harder to think of something the world needs more.