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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

#391

Post by bcarrell »

jpollock wrote: post #377
bcarrell wrote: post #358

I 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…

We already give pretty good indications on how much carbon something is producing based on the power/oil bill. If you act to reduce your total outgoings, you're probably heading in the right direction. Add insulation. If your house was built in 1960, was it retrofitted with wall insulation? Put more into the ceiling. Depending on how much space you have, you can de-carbon your heat generation. Investigate heat pumps…

> Add insulation. If your house was built in 1960, was it retrofitted with wall insulation? Put more into the ceiling.

Walls were stripped to the studs approx. 8-10 years ago and new fiberglass insulation installed at that point. Attic has (rough) batt insulation, but I suspect it could be better there. Air handler for the air conditioning system is also in the attic due to, I suspect, no other viable option for the design. Probably some loss there.

> Investigate heat pumps (ground loop for up there) for both hot air and hot water. Solar hot water might be viable. In the US, the tax breaks make solar power a gimme if you have the money.

I'll take a look, thanks. I'll note that I have ductwork for the air conditioning system but the (separate) heating system uses baseboard. Unfortunately, the finished basement doesn't have ductwork installed.

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

#392

Post by ak217 »

kpwagner wrote: post #385

Sergey Brin made a statement regarding global warming: something like, "I'm not worried about it. We can put solar-powered carbon scrubbers in the deserts of the world and essentially fix the problem with an investment in the tens of billions (relatively small)." I forget where I heard this and wasn't able to dig up a source. I think it was a Jason Calacanis podcast or video of an interview. Either way it was seconda…

Brin has the right idea. The only thing that will realistically help - aside from massive reforestation efforts or maybe bioengineered algae - is a mass-produced, maintenance-free solid-state artificial photosynthesis module. The problem is, very few people - almost all academics - have even been thinking about such a thing, much less engineering it. So there's enormous amounts of work to do.

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

#393

Post by scatters »

dasboth wrote: post #221
scatters wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opportunity cost. Those resources could conceivably be better spent building roads, railways, factories, protecting wetlands, rewilding forests, educating children... There are plenty of current, pressing problems to solve; why solve a problem that won't exist for decades if not centuries?

OK, I can understand that. Does that however not come with the assumption that we can solve that problem quickly when it does come about (assuming we can calculate roughly when we run out of fossil fuels)? I don't know how much evidence there is out there that that's the case.

In a market economy, we never actually run out of a resource; rather, the price rises gradually in accordance with increasing scarcity and cost of extraction, making alternatives more cost-effective, increasing the reward to researching alternatives, and pushing the use of that resource into niches where the cost doesn't matter as much.

Examples of this would be guano (replaced by saltpeter and then by the Haber process) and whale oil (replaced by petroleum).

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

#394

Post by PrettyButUgly »

bad_user wrote: post #209
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.

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…

"add lots of taxes" - How incredibly naive. Any tax money would be wasted. Some people would pay more, some corrupt people will find a way to spend that tax money, and almost nothing else would change.

Well maybe, you'll make it so poor people can't drive or cool their houses in the summer, but the middle class and up won't change their behavior.

I wish you "just tax it" people would hold your electives accountable for spending before you throw more money at them.

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

#395

Post by epistasis »

ak217 wrote: post #386
spdustin wrote: post #374

I've come to the (I feel) inevitable conclusion that we are already well and truly fucked. I will still do what I can to slow the inexorable slide into worldwide famine, war and anarchy, in the hopes that the majority of my children's lives will be made incrementally better, should they choose to remain on this planet (and, it is assumed, that they may actually have a choice, but there's no way I can know). We're on…

We need a Mahnattan Project for carbon sequestration.

Or a carbon tax. Exxon is planning on a $80/ton tax, which is about $0.80/gallon of gasoline. It's a travesty that Exxon is taking this more seriously than the majority of US politicians.

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

#396

Post by mseebach »

zaroth wrote: post #373
mseebach wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, there's no evidence that the carbon tax would have to be so high to be effective - $7-20/ton[1], probably increasing over time. US emissions per person is the world highest at 16.5 tons -- that's several hundred dollars per year , not day. Second, the revenue from the carbon tax should be fed back to the people by lowering other taxes. It should be net-zero on the government budget. The point is to create a cl…

> US emissions per person is the world highest at 16.5 tons -- that's several hundred dollars per year, not day. That's 16.5 tons per man, woman, and child, right? So potentially over $1,000 for a family of 4. > Second, the revenue from the carbon tax should be fed back to the people by lowering other taxes. It should be net-zero on the government budget. The bottom 50% of earners currently pay about 3% of Federal ta…

A simple solution could be to cut every man, woman and child a cheque for 1/nth of the carbon tax revenue. The top 50% probably use more than 50% of all the carbon (but are probably also better positioned to cut their emissions in the short term), so it should be fairly progressive, distribution-wise.

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

#397

Post by enraged_camel »

ldonley wrote: post #389
spdustin wrote: post #374

I've come to the (I feel) inevitable conclusion that we are already well and truly fucked. I will still do what I can to slow the inexorable slide into worldwide famine, war and anarchy, in the hopes that the majority of my children's lives will be made incrementally better, should they choose to remain on this planet (and, it is assumed, that they may actually have a choice, but there's no way I can know). We're on…

This is tangential to your point about remaining on this planet, but it is much easier to survive on our planet, polluted or not, than it is to setup shop on a different planet. I am fully in agreement with your view on how messed up things are on our planet due to human action. I just felt compelled to point out that any adjustments to be made on other planets can be done here. Can't breath on mars? Build a dome and…

>>This is tangential to your point about remaining on this planet, but it is much easier to survive on our planet, polluted or not, than it is to setup shop on a different planet.

While true, this also means that we have taken our planet for granted, since survival on it is so easy. We have to plan things much more carefully and deliberately on the next planet we inhabit.

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

#398

Post by ak217 »

James001 wrote: post #388
ak217 wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need a Mahnattan Project for carbon sequestration.

I can take all that money if you'd like and plant a few trees?

Absolutely, that should be part of it. Fleets of drones planting forests. But artificial photosynthesis modules in the desert and engineered algae could also play a huge role.

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

#399

Post by bcarrell »

epistasis wrote: post #382
bcarrell wrote: post #358

I 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…

Take a hard look at the numbers. For example, livestock are responsible for 3.1% of US co2 equivalent warming (Wikipedia citing the US EPA), so going from average meat consumption to no meat consumption isn't a huge impact, but it's something. $5k is about a dollar a day for 13 years; switching to natural gas is about 25% more efficient than fuel oil, co2-wise. Depending on how much heating you need that 25% could be…

Sorry, 5k to run the lines, and I'm guessing another 5k to remove the oil tank and install new equipment. Roughly 10k for me to switch from oil to gas. Mentioned my insulation situation in other comments. Thanks!

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

#400

Post by rybosome »

blondie9x wrote: post #383

We all know by now CO2 and CH4 leads to a warmer planet. We also know what's driving greenhouse gas levels to rise across Earth. Contributors are deforestation, intensive animal farming, and primarily the combustion of carbon fossil fuels like coal, tar sands, oil, natural gas etc. But here is the underlying problem, despite us knowing how bad things are, (97+% of scientists who study this field agree we are causing…

The problem is that not enough people care. I've tried bringing it up with many of my friends. Responses include:

"We can't risk damaging the economy"

"The biggest priority in this country should be the mistreatment of minorities, you wouldn't care so much about the environment if you weren't white"

"It's not a big deal, we will just relocate cities when flooding happens"

"Scientists are wrong plenty of times"

...and on and on. Nobody really takes it seriously that we could be destroying the conditions which allow human life to exist on this planet. They are shielded by a raft of excuses, the issues which they are most concerned with, and endless high-budget entertainment.

Unless there is a technological miracle that makes all of this simple, I believe that we are (in the words of another commenter) well and truly fucked.

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