Greenhouse-gas emissions are increasing the frequency of heatwaves | Hacker News Reader

Greenhouse-gas emissions are increasing the frequency of heatwaves

economist.com

23 pointspseudolus13 comments

I'm sitting here in the middle of The Netherlands. It's almost 40c outside (104f) and 26.5c (80f) inside.

There's something seriously wrong with our climate and we need to take action now. Not in 5 years, not in 10 years. Now. The developed and developing world should be planning to decommission all coal power and replace it with renewables over a 2-10 year period. We should be ramping up the planting of forests now (we've got 50 years to work out how to sequester that carbon) to give us breathing space to solve the hard issues like concrete and oil.

I'm sure that even the far right can see the benefit of living in a world where we are free from the oil Sheiks and even totally free from the energy monopolies and government? Where we can generate our own energy and use it to power our transport, houses and lives?

We're moving to a larger house next year, I'm 100% going to get sun panels installed and the insulation improved. I'll also see if we can do something to actively cool the house (an airco is easy to install but it needs to be driven by the panels to make sense).

We need to first get serious about definitions and goals. The first step is to move away from calling it climate change to climate affectation. Climate change is a trap prone opening where people ask: do you believe in climate change? If answering in the negative, you are branded anti-science when your answer meant that you do not believe in significant anthropogenic climate change or some variant therein, which allows for healthy debates. If we can start from here we can start to have discussions.

Next, we need to lay out what we can and want to do: reduce CO2, capture CO2, or not care about CO2 and put a sun visor up in space. Then we need to identify what is politically feasible, not some Kyoto or Paris accords nonsense, we are talking people are going to do it; a good example is CO2 reduction enforcement in China, no matter what we say the other countries are doing, China does not care more than lip service, just like USSR and India, about the environment at their developmental stage. If you are not willing to go to war (economically or confrontationally) with China to make them follow the world rules, then everything everyone else does is worthless. If you want an example of the timidity you start at, look to Iran and its flouting of rules it agreed to abide to on nuclear weapon development and this is a country with a stated goal of destroying other countries.

Next, an honest discussion about energy sources. Solar and wind need to be dropped as energy sources, it is perfect for people on their houses, but solar kills natural landscapes and wind kills birds. The battery storage is not going anywhere and we are not providing an answer with these technologies to base generation. Nuclear energy may not be economically viable, but it is the one that is environmentally viable and should be given the subsidies we funnel to the companies; looking at you Solyndra.

Finally, as a thought experiment, what is the unaffected climate change that would have occurred and if we go below that rate with our actions, do we undo that?

Nuclear energy suffers from heatwaves the same way all thermal power plants do, so its reliability is questionable.

Recently France had to temporarily shut off 5GW(8% of total) of power due to weather conditions:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-electricity-heatwa...

Also the LCOE of nuclear is way to high. Currently a combination of renewables and gas plants is the fastest and cheapest way to reduce emissions.

Past a certain point it won't help, but given how batteries are getting cheaper at an exponential rate, we may not reach it before they become commercially viable.

It's already too late.

The generally accepted climate models are watered down versions that were acceptable to big business and politicians, it gave them the wiggle room to pass the buck. "We still have time, someone else can fix it later."

The thawing of the permafrost will release massive amounts of CO2, and methane, as well as nitrous oxide, way more than what was expected. The thawing of the permafrost will continue to drive warming, causing more permafrost the thaw, not to mention the burning of that thawed permafrost. The earth and climate are already locked into a positive feedback loop and nothing short of a super volcano or a large meteor strike will interrupt the loop.

What humans have set into motion can't be slowed or stopped by any human activity, all we can do is be witness to what's happening. Our hubris, which got us here in the first place, will continue to drive our belief that we can fix this.

Maybe it can't be stopped, but it can obviously be slowed. And slowing climate change can have a huge impact on people and the environment.

The interventions to slow climate change and to stop it are the same. A failed attempt to stop climate change is a successful attempt to slow it.

Attitudes like yours cause people to throw up their hands and do nothing, accelerating climate change instead of slowing it.

Maybe you are right. But assuming this is true, don't we have a moral obligation to at least trying to save the maximum of people for as long as possible ?

In the midst of one here in NL at the moment. 39.3 celsius yesterday.

It's worse today. I've given up working, it's too hot. And I need to cycle for 45 mins in this later to pick the kids up.

I'm going to do my best to join the Climate Strike in September (https://globalclimatestrike.net) even though it's going to be difficult with a newborn (due first week of September).

If you can't get through the paywall, you can use the following trick: Load the page and immediately press Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C (or equivalent for other OS than Windows). You can then paste the article elsewhere, e.g. pastebin.

I just wondered if it's really the CO², maybe we just generate too much heat in general and that's what's warming the planet? Charging the phone, phone heats up, having the laptop up -> heat. All the household appliances generate heat. Germany. There was this one or two days in usa where no airplanes were flying(after 9/11) and the temperature over there dropped by 1-2 degrees.

We generate a lot of heat, but so does the sun by shining on half of the earth's surface. That should not be a problem however, since it goes back into space in the form of infrared beams. The natural greenhouse effect obstructs just enough of those beams to keep our planet at a stable temperature that life has had plenty of time to adjust to. Now that the greenhouse effect has been artificially enhanced by adding lots of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, more infrared beams (from the sun, but probably also some from human activity) are kept in the atmosphere and so it warms. So ultimately, the sun is just vastly more powerful than human activity, and any excess heat would be emitted into space if it weren't for the artificially raised greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere.

The sun irradiates the planet with about 1,000 W / Square meter, the area irradiated is always about half of the planet, with the amount of light reflected for any given spot corresponding to the co-sine of the angle at which the light hits.

In a given hour - taking into account the albedo of the earth, 0.31 - the earth soaks up more sun than the world as a whole consumes in a year.

So yes, we are generating a lot of heat, but compared to what the sun does it is not a factor.

The amount of heat we generate doesn't register compared to the sun.

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