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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

#511

Post by flukus »

sevenless wrote: post #500
flukus wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not only this, but as the article touches upon, it may end up being lethal to go outdoors. At over 35C/95F with humidity of 100%, humans and other animals cannot cool themselves, even naked, in a breeze, in the shade, and die of heat exhaustion. There are plenty of places in the world that regularly ge t those conditions. People/Animals survive.

I don't think so, not with that humidity. People can't live in conditions where wet bulb temperature exceeds body temperature for long. You simply can't cool down by sweating.

How about Bangkok: http://www.holiday-weather.com/bangkok/averages/

The average high temperature for some months is in the low to mid 30's and with >90% humidity (which goes up locally after rain).

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

#512

Post by madaxe_again »

flukus wrote: post #511
sevenless wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think so, not with that humidity. People can't live in conditions where wet bulb temperature exceeds body temperature for long. You simply can't cool down by sweating.

How about Bangkok: http://www.holiday-weather.com/bangkok/averages/ The average high temperature for some months is in the low to mid 30's and with >90% humidity (which goes up locally after rain).

>90%!=100%. Read up on "wet bulb temperature". Or, if you prefer, go sit in a 40 degree sauna at 100% humidity for six hours, then report back.

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

#513

Post by tripzilch »

nilved wrote: post #239
Lagged2Death wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regulation has never fixed anything. Young, inexperienced but passionate fish sometimes have been known to deny the existence of water. Later they're embarrassed.

I can take you to the water, but I can't make you drink it.

Did you already forget about the CIA torture report?

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

#514

Post by tripzilch »

joshyeager wrote: post #247
CalRobert wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Live in a multi-unit building in a city where you can commute and do errands by walking or cycling (electric bikes are fine and get around that whole pedaling bit). Source your energy renewably and use little of it (80-300kwh per month isn't crazy depending on your climate). Don't buy much stuff. Eat very little meat. I mean, it doesn't take it to 0 but even if you DO want a comfortable life it doesn't mean living in…

All of that sounds reasonable, except "Live in a multi-unit building in a city". Being that close to that many people sounds like hell.

Yes, if only there weren't so many darn people on this planet, but of course you're entitled to your space. /s

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

#515

Post by throwanem »

RankingMember wrote: post #502
throwanem wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Language can be a form of play! I picked up my vocabulary from books, back when books were what you had to use. You have the Internet. Go thou forth and roll around in it!

I also speak Spanish, but not in comments since my goal is to have the people understand me. ;) IMO it's important to keep the person who's going to read your words in mind if you want them to understand you rather than using your favorite high-dollar words to try to sound smart. Making word soup like that obfuscates your message, as evidenced by the off-message conversation we're having right now.

Not that you're wrong, but I've been having conversations like the one that is on message here for a very long time now. I'm accustomed to there being a few people who will say "well, the real problem is that there's just too many people", and I'm familiar with the typical unwillingness of such people to be drawn on questions like exactly whom they find surplus to requirements, exactly how they see that changing, and exactly why they imagine it reasonable to say such things in front of God and everybody, just as though it were nothing to be ashamed of.

I've more or less given up trying to draw such people into useful conversation, because there isn't enough common ground for direct discourse between me and someone who finds it other than abhorrent to seriously contemplate mass human slaughter as a geoengineering technique. Happily for my state of mind if nothing else, that perspective seems rare enough overall to make largely unnecessary an engagement for the benefit of the audience - put simply, this isn't really a subject on which most people need a worked example.

So, in such a case, I sometimes feel at some liberty to indulge myself, especially here on Hacker News, where the typical user's personal lexicon is considerably broader than you tend to find a lot of other places. Of course I understand that it's not a game to everyone the way it is to me. But I also understand that I'm not the only one who feels that way about it. And I don't really know that there's a lot of grounds to assume, for example, that I'm just "using high-dollar words to try to sound smart". I mean, I already know I'm not all that smart, and I hope I'm not terribly insecure about it; I make myself useful in other ways, and in general I'm just glad to be able to keep up on HN to the relatively limited extent I succeed in so doing.

Some folks just like playing with words, that's all. I've always been one of them. Sometimes, when there's no real need to hammer home a point most people already grasp implicitly and the rest aren't at home to, I screw around a little. You're the first person who has evinced any upset at all about that since before I was in high school. Maybe you're right, and I shouldn't indulge myself this way at all, rather than just doing so very rarely. But I don't really know that I care to stop. I guess I'll just have to hope that people getting bent out of shape over it remains as rare as it has been throughout my life heretofore.

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

#516

Post by throwanem »

snarfy wrote: post #190
michael_h wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're probably correct on this point in general, but the tax break I get from having kids offsets the cost of almost two weeks of preschool. No one is having kids to save money.

You're right of course. Again, no real solutions just pointing out a problem. Also, not sure why people assume I want to reopen Auschwitz when I say we need less people.

Hey, don't get me wrong - I don't assume you want to reopen Auschwitz. I mean, Hitler was a piker. If you really want to get rid of excess population, you want to go for something like engineered famine. Worked for the Soviets, at any rate, to the tune of something like thirty million, but of course that's almost a century ago and there's inflation to consider, so you're going to want to shoot far higher.

Perhaps you think I'm being unkind to you here, or unjust, or unreasonable somehow. Perhaps you don't really understand how people make a connection between saying "there are too many people" and this kind of thing. Perhaps, too, it has escaped your notice that a lot of people said things like that in the century just past, and that the result was atrocity on a scale possibly never equaled, certainly never exceeded, in all human history before that time.

And here you are, not even a hundred years later, trotting out the same blood-soaked idea that started it all - and with the sheer unthinking temerity, the gall, to expect a friendly reception. Do you know nothing of history? Or do you just not care?

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

#517

Post by dbdr »

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…

> livestock are responsible for 3.1% of US co2 equivalent warming (Wikipedia citing the US EPA)

The same Wikipedia article also mentions FAO studies giving 14.5% and 18% globally. I wonder what explains the difference. Methodology? Ignoring the contribution of imports? Much higher emissions in the US compared to the world in other areas reducing the relative but not the absolute impact of livestock?

In any case meat and animal products seem very relevant to GHG emissions worldwide, and they might be in the US once you reduce other waste. But it's indeed a good idea to focus on the major contributors and low-hanging fruits first.

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

#518

Post by colordrops »

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…

If any individual was capable of financing and building these scrubbers, it would be Brin. What is he waiting for?

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

#519

Post by jandrese »

sevenless wrote: post #486
jandrese wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically it is irreversible on a human level timescale. Many generations of life on this planet are going to have to adjust to higher average temperatures. It's going to be (and already is really) a mini-extinction event. Unless we don't change course, then it might be a mass extinction.

There's the possibility of geo-engineering.

We can't even agree to stop causing damage. Agreeing to undertake a colossally expensive project to reverse the damage seems like a political impossibility. In 50 or a 100 years maybe, but not in the world as it is today.

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

#520

Post by mikeash »

James001 wrote: post #507
mikeash wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typical double standard, your speculation is perfectly reasonable but the other guy's claims need scientific backing. Annoying, and not very convincing!

You must have never delved too much into science then. There are certain claims that have been well established for so long that citations are no longer needed. For example, we don't need citations to state the order of colours in a rainbow. Likewise, I don't need a citation to state that plant biomass increases with a greater concentration of CO2. That's basic science, it's unequivocal and not controversial. On the…

Searching around, it looks like what you say is often the case, but is not guaranteed, and the full effects of increased CO2 concentration on real-world crops is still very much up in the air. For example:

https://www.mpg.de/6650626/carbon-dioxide-crop-yields

Sure doesn't look as simple as the order of colors in a rainbow to me.

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