Live data from Hacker News

A graph that should be front-page news

lyrebirddreaming.com

361–370 of 469 posts

Re: A graph that should be front-page news

#361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China has a far lower per capita carbon emissions rate than the US. Has a growing share of energy produced by green technology. Is the world leader in manufacturing electric cars and using electric cars. Is the global leader in low cost solar panels and batteries among other green technology. Oh yeah, and a huge portion of their emissions go to making things that Americans consume. On top of all that, they have manag…

The problem is that the earth doesn’t care about a per capita denominator.

Then it doesn't matter if the US reduces emissions or China does. They all count. The US has more money to spend on reducing emissions. Ergo it makes sense for the US to go first.

Re: A graph that should be front-page news

#362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does any country care? China ostensibly cares, their five year plans drawn up by committees of Engineers (Civil, Mechanical, Electrical) and Scientists are on an arc to minimise reliance on fossil fuels and transition to renewables (wind, solar), and nuclear. There are strategic reasons for this, of course. > Isnt China far worse thsn the US? "It's complicated" * Historically the US is responsible for a greater mas…

> although they are on the cusp of peaking their use That’s a really nice way of saying “their usage is currently at an all time high and will go up further”. They don’t get to take credit for a potential future action.

I think you've made up your mind regardless of facts or data.

Re: A graph that should be front-page news

#363
post #303
post #245

the problem with this kind of article is half of them push a doom angle and the other half talk about carbon footprint. both of them have the same effect making people give up or do useless lifestyle changes that do nothing for the environment. we should be pushing for backend changes that are invisible but actually make things better. that means massive subsidies to build out clean power and electrify everything. po…

Or -- hear me out on this one -- we could ban wind energy, raise costs for electric vehicles, and use government resources to promote increased use of coal and oil. That would have a bunch of advantages such as sounding familiar to leaders whose heyday was in the 1970s, of not making us feel bad about the state of the world, and occasionally giving financial kickbacks to government leaders. Or... if you don't like th…

Texas, with their evil leadership, generates significantly more solar and wind energy than California, and has significantly more energy storage.

So maybe just blaming this on a political viewpoint you don't like doesn't actually help anything?

https://www.reddit.com/r/charts/comments/1t5ud20/texas_vs_ca...

Re: A graph that should be front-page news

#364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agent Smith: I'd like to share a revelation during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to s…

He is wrong, by the way. Most animals multiply until they exceed carrying capacity, then die off in massive numbers, then repeat. They may find a long-term equilibrium. The current boom in human population, and a subsequent die-off that has not yet happened, were predicted back in the 1970s.

This happened in rapid succession in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. First rodents and small scavengers multiplied rapidly, but then the easy food ran out and their predators showed up, and the cycle repeated. The zone is now roughly at equilibrium, we think, but it's isolated and surrounded by human activity so it's hard to be sure.

The Kaibab Plateau deer disaster from 1906 to 1939 also demonstrated boom and bust cycles.

Re: A graph that should be front-page news

#366
post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're arguing against "degrowthers", favouring the current growth-based system. What you're arguing for is a system that requires the infinite growth you don't want to think about. So in essence you're saying "looking at the consequences of my beliefs is absurd", which is hardly a compelling argument.

If my system requires infinity growth then yours also does require infinite resources by the logic outlines above. If you agree that your system does not require infinite resources because we should be talking only at timescales that are relevant to humans, then my system also does not require infinite growth. You can’t have it both ways, either you are ok with infinite timeframe (and then degrowth will eventually ru…

Nonsense, but you clearly either haven't read my replies or don't understand that capitalism requires growth while some other economic systems don't. Even 1% growth per year is exponential growth and quickly will run into limits (as we are currently experiencing!).

But let's grant "both systems eventually run out of resources" for the sake of argument. The rate at which that happens then becomes clearly relevant, and if staying alive is good (I hope we can at least agree on that), using resources slower is better. Capitalism is depleting resources on a human timescale (as, again, we are currently experiencing with climate change), so instead depleting them on longer-than-human timescales is clearly the better option.

Re: A graph that should be front-page news

#367

Don't worry, just a few more months until we get AGI and all of our problems magically disappear as the singularity changes everything forever. Why care for current iterations of nature, when we will all get to experience infinite varities of it as immortal digital consciousnesses?

Forgot the /s tag

Re: A graph that should be front-page news

#368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't find the source URL unreadable. It's here: https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=nino3.4 The lowest ones were 1988 and 1989.

Fair, I had to click into the full size (I pinch zoomed on my phone). But now the fact that 1988/1989 are outliers raise a few more questions about the variance calculation. In particular, the title suggests that those weren't included in the variance calculation. A 3.5-sigma event is a 1-in-1000 chance. Yet we have 2 of them in our data set that goes back only 40ish years? Something is suspect. Maybe I'm not account…

I think a 3.5-sigma event being a 1/1000 probability is only under the assumption of random data - a constant climate would deliver more-or-less random data around some mean.

The appearance of two 3.5-sigma events suggests that the data is no longer being randomly generated around that mean, but is instead drifting away from that mean.

More concretely, if all the data were within 2-sigma, then you could invoke the null-hypothesis and refute climate change. Beyond 2-sigma (and even worse two 3.5-sigma events) refuting climate change becomes (much) less reasonable.

Re: A graph that should be front-page news

#369
post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair, I had to click into the full size (I pinch zoomed on my phone). But now the fact that 1988/1989 are outliers raise a few more questions about the variance calculation. In particular, the title suggests that those weren't included in the variance calculation. A 3.5-sigma event is a 1-in-1000 chance. Yet we have 2 of them in our data set that goes back only 40ish years? Something is suspect. Maybe I'm not account…

Why are you assuming gaussianity?

The tails could be heavy, it's true. This could make my usual 1-in-1000 heuristic overly conservative. Let's go with that, heavy tails. The data shows we are at something between a 1-in40 and 1-in-20 deviation. Normally (pun intended) that's ~2-sigma deviation. So... I guess it doesn't really seem like an epoch defining El Niño.

Re: A graph that should be front-page news

#370
post #245

the problem with this kind of article is half of them push a doom angle and the other half talk about carbon footprint. both of them have the same effect making people give up or do useless lifestyle changes that do nothing for the environment. we should be pushing for backend changes that are invisible but actually make things better. that means massive subsidies to build out clean power and electrify everything. po…

>combustion engine bans You think that won't do anything?

Riots
Post reply on HN