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Earth NASA Science

Earth is Trapping 'Unprecedented' Amount of Heat, NASA Says (theguardian.com) 225

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
The Earth is trapping nearly twice as much heat as it did in 2005, according to new research, described as an "unprecedented" increase amid the climate crisis. From a report: Scientists from NASA, the US space agency, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), reported in a new study that Earth's "energy imbalance approximately doubled" from 2005 to 2019. The increase was described as "alarming." "Energy imbalance" refers to the difference between how much of the Sun's "radiative energy" is absorbed by Earth's atmosphere and surface, compared to how much "thermal infrared radiationâ bounces back into space.

"A positive energy imbalance means the Earth system is gaining energy, causing the planet to heat up," NASA said in a statement about this study. Scientists determined there was an energy imbalance by comparing data from satellite sensors -- which track how much energy enters and exits Earth's system -- and data from ocean floats. This system of data-gathering floats, which stretches across the globe, allows for "an accurate estimate of the rate at which the world's oceans are heating up." Because about 90% of excess energy from an imbalance winds up in the ocean, the satellite sensors' data should correspond with temperature changes in oceans.
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Earth is Trapping 'Unprecedented' Amount of Heat, NASA Says More

Earth is Trapping 'Unprecedented' Amount of Heat, NASA Says

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  • Here's a fix... (Score:4, Funny)

    by billybob2001 ( 234675 ) on Friday June 18, 2021 @11:17AM (#61498916)

    This is why the planet needs my new invention:

    The Heat Elevator

    (or maybe the Space Heater)

  • What we need to do (Score:5, Interesting)

    by JoshuaZ ( 1134087 ) on Friday June 18, 2021 @11:20AM (#61498928) Homepage
    At this point, some amount of climate change is really inevitable. We screwed up badly. But that doesn't mean that there's nothing we can do. The faster we switch to low-carbon or zero carbon energy sources, the less damage we'll have and the more time we'll have to figure out large-scale solutions like geoengineering. So we still need to take good steps.

    So what can you do to help? There are three broad categories you can help, personal, political and charitable.

    In terms of personal activity, you can use less carbon. Easy ways to do so are to eat less meat, use more public transit and drive less. If you do need a new car, consider getting an electric car or hybrid. (In almost the entire US, an electric car will produce less CO2. West Virginia and Wyoming right now are two of the few possible exceptions due to their massive coal use https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/10/28/climate/how-electricity-generation-changed-in-your-state-election.html [nytimes.com]). You can also buy solar panels for your house, use less air conditioning, and get more insulation for your home, which will take less energy to then heat in the winter. All of these things are not just good for the environment but save you money.

    In terms of politics, you can support candidates who support systemic changes which will reduce CO2. In the US, this largely means donating to Democratic candidates, although some are substantially better than others. Unfortunately, Republicans who supported dealing with climate change are often people like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Christie Todd Whitman who have been largely pushed out of the party. (And that's even with Whitman being a very vocal supporter of nuclear power.) If you want to support clean energy without supporting any specific candidates or policies, then you can donate here to a group which lobbies for more government support for solar power https://lets-fund.org/clean-energy/ [lets-fund.org].

    In terms of charitable work, you can donate to charities which help get more solar and wind power. For solar power, there are two good ones. Everybody Solar https://www.everybodysolar.org/ [everybodysolar.org] helps get solar panels for non-profits like science museums and homeless shelters. The Solar Electric Light Fund https://www.self.org/ [self.org] helps get solar panels for developing countries in locations they don't have electric power. This helps provide resources for severely impoverished people. It also helps make sure that as those countries transition into modernization they don't need to go through the same high fossil fuel use that the rest of the world did. Lastly, for wind power, the New England Wind Fund https://www.greenenergyconsumers.org/newenglandwindfund [greenenergyconsumers.org] is a good source. They help build more wind power in the North-East of the US. This is good because right now the North East has very little wind power despite having strong winds, so building more wind power there doesn't put any strain on the grid.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Rick Schumann ( 4662797 )
      Hey, you, stop making sense, how dare you attempt to upset the status quo!

    • Re:What we need to do (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 18, 2021 @11:36AM (#61498980)

      These are all nice ideas, but the only solution you can implement as an individual that scales exponentially is to not have children.

    • Which democrats actively oppose biomass energy? If a renewable energy push just results in all the coal plants being retrofit to burn forests I'm perfectly content doing fuck all and praying for the singularity. The EU has already doubled down on burning forests recently.

      Being seen as meeting the holy renewable energy goals are so important most politicians will speed us off the cliff to meet them.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by bored ( 40072 )

      Please, this comment could have been from 1970s, and its 100% of why we this problem hasn't been solved.

      Texas has one of the largest green energy rollouts in the world, and its a failure when it comes to reducing C02 emissions. For every MW of green energy installed we have 3X in NG load following. Sure for a couple days a year, we are 100% renewable but for the remaining ~300 days a year or so it can get so bad that we are at 100% CO2 burning.

      To solve this problem, the green energy people need to shut the

      • Re:What we need to do (Score:5, Insightful)

        by JoshuaZ ( 1134087 ) on Friday June 18, 2021 @12:08PM (#61499058) Homepage

        :Texas has one of the largest green energy rollouts in the world, and its a failure when it comes to reducing C02 emissions.

        The percentage of power that CO2 neutral in Texas has been steadily growing. In the early 2000s, about 10% of Texas's electric power was from zero carbon power sources, with almost all of that being nuclear power. In 2019 that was now 17% with nearly the same percentage nuclear but a massive increase in wind and solar https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/10/28/climate/how-electricity-generation-changed-in-your-state-election.html [nytimes.com].

        :Sure for a couple days a year, we are 100% renewable but for the remaining ~300 days a year or so it can get so bad that we are at 100% CO2 burning.

        Texas pretty much is never at 100% CO2; the nuke plants themselves would make that not the case. But some solar and wind is pretty much always functioning. In any event, burning NG in peaker plants is substantially better than burning coal, with about half as much CO2 per a kilowatt-hour as with coal. Texas's problems are also a bit unique. It has its own electric grid, separate from the East and West grids which are the big US grids. So they both cannot offload excess wind or solar power to other grids, and they cannot get power from elsewhere than needed. There is a project, the Tres Amigas Superstation to connect the Texas grid to the other two grids which will allow excesses from the different grids (especially extra wind from Iowa and Nebraska, excess solar in California, and excess wind in Texas) to go to the other grids, but unfortunately that project is behind schedule and overbudget. But the upshot is that using Texas as an example is really not great. It has its own, pretty unique issues. And even Texas has had an overall increase in percentage of electric power from low CO2-sources. That's true for pretty much the entire US incidentally, with the percentage of low CO2 generally going down.

        To solve this problem what we need are a 1970's level of nuke rollout like France.

        In principle this would be great. Practically, this will take a very long time and a lot of funding which doesn't exist. We need more low carbon power now. Nuclear plants can take a decade to build, and cost a lot.

        Then instead of decreasing production when there is excess supply it needs to be used for one of the many C02->liquid fuel recapture cycles for use in air travel/etc.

        This isn't a bad idea, although my guess is that air travel will be probably be one of the very last thing that will be made carbon neutral. But you can also do a version of this with solar and wind power. One can use the Sabatier process to use excess power to make methane from CO2 in the air, and then one can turn current natural gas plants into high density energy storage systems. But as with anything involving recapture, this is a very long-term plan; we're not really building it now, and my comment was in part to focus on short term impacts that work.

        Your point about nuclear power does touch on one serious problem though. There are environmental groups which have pushed for the closing of a whole bunch of nuclear plants, including Diablo in California and Pilgrim in Massachusetts. Regardless of whether building more nukes now is a good idea or not, closing them down is clearly very counterproductive.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by bored ( 40072 )

          Yes, i'm rounding in TX, but the point is that while the wind rollout is huge, so is the energy demand growth. Last I looked the green energy rollout wasn't even keeping up with the demand increase. Which isn't going to decline as long as people keep moving here and building crappy houses.

          Nukes take a decade to build because id10t green energy/etc people NIMBY them.

          Battery+Wind+Solar rollouts _WILL_ take longer than a decade too.

          So if one stands here today, and says how do I solve this the fastest, the answ

          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            by JoshuaZ ( 1134087 )

            Yes, i'm rounding in TX, but the point is that while the wind rollout is huge, so is the energy demand growth. Last I looked the green energy rollout wasn't even keeping up with the demand increase.

            This isn't really a green energy specific issue. Texas isn't building up nearly enough new power to keep up with demand. That's even with Texas building more natural gas. In general, Texas isn't putting in nearly as much investment at it needs to into infrastructure in general. This is just one aspect of it.

            Which isn't going to decline as long as people keep moving here and building crappy houses.

            I agree this is a major problem. People in Texas seem to be incapable of building houses with substantial insulation now or anything like house designs which have any natural cooling. But a lot of these

            • Re:What we need to do (Score:4, Interesting)

              by bored ( 40072 ) on Friday June 18, 2021 @01:48PM (#61499342)

              Your right about everything you said, except for the bits about nukes. You must live in TX, so you know about STP. We could just clone that design and built a couple dozen more its only 30 years old (although the design is still from the 70's). It took 13 years to construct the first time around, surely we can do better the second time around if we don't change the contractor a half dozen times and go through a bunch of political BS to slow it down.

              Just a two copies of that plant would be roughly the same power output as the entire installed wind capacity in TX. 10 copies and we could replace all the NG in use. According to Wikipedia it cost $15B in 2019 dollars to build that plant including all the contractors being replaced and all that bullcrap. So for roughly one year of the texas budget we could wipe out all the remaining coal plants and over half of the NG plants in TX, which would result in effectively 100% carbon free energy production and we probably could do it in under a decade like the french if we wanted to.

              • No, I don't live in Texas, but I do have some interest in energy issues in general. STP is a good design although it can't quite be cloned, since some aspects depend on local water and geology but it isn't a bad template. It isn't the only good design out there that could be used with only small changes. But the problem is that yes that "political BS" is inevitable at this point. It isn't going to go away no matter how much you or I want. If you want to keep pushing for people to be build more nukes, I'll c

                • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

                  by bored ( 40072 )

                  Yes, thats why i'm telling the green energy, lets live in caves folks to STFU.

                  I really do think that if they had STFU 20 years ago when Bush suggested more nukes (along with clean coal, another magic pixie dust technology) we would actually be in a better position than we are today. If even a half dozen new nukes were built, it would have had more of an effect than all the green energy in the US.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by bored ( 40072 )

                And just to broaden the reach a bit, imagine instead of spending another trillion dollars at the federal level bailing out a bunch of companies that should probably go out of business for failing to plan for a slight drop in their revenue, we instead cloned that design nationwide. Say it costs us $10B each (which is insane, its a few million in concrete and water pumps for christ's sake) that's 100 plants producing ~2TW, which would remove CO2 from our electric generation.

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by SoftwareArtist ( 1472499 )

            Last I looked the green energy rollout wasn't even keeping up with the demand increase. Which isn't going to decline as long as people keep moving here and building crappy houses.

            That's exactly the problem. It's demand, not supply. People in Texas waste energy because they're allowed to waste energy, and no one makes them pay the true cost (including harm to the environment) of the energy they waste.

            Compare to California which for many years has had strict building codes, efficiency standards for appliances, efficiency standards for cars, its own cap-and-trade system to limit CO2, and so on. The result? California uses less than half [eia.gov] as much energy per person as Texas. This isn

        • > Texas pretty much is never at 100% CO2;
          https://www.electricitymap.org... [electricitymap.org]

          Indeed, just about 70% constantly.

        • Electricity from atomic energy emits 90 to 140 g CO2 per kWh .

          https://timeforchange.org/co2-... [timeforchange.org]

          "Some of the nuclear lobbyists even claim that the production of electricity by atomic energy does not emit any CO2. But this is nonsense. Whenever a plant is built to produce electricity, CO2 is emitted. So even the production of electricity by renewable resources like solar power, water, wind, or biomass does release some CO2."

          Technology, ... g CO2 per kWh electricity
          Solar power, water power and wind power, .

      • To solve this problem, the green energy people need to shut the * up if this is all they have to say. To solve this problem what we need are a 1970's level of nuke rollout like France. 100% nuke, and we encourage people to buy electric cars which are themselves load following and only charge during non pea

        Nuclear just simply costs massively more than wind energy. For every unit of Nuclear electricity you produce, you can have three times as much wind energy, you can do it with a much more rapid return on investment and, since the cheapest way to provide for dips in wind power is to build more wind turbines connected to a large scale distributed grid, you can have a massive amount of spare capacity for charging electric cars off hours, almost for free.

        Investing in nuclear power (as opposed to nuclear researc

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by bored ( 40072 )

          Your are looking at MW/H costs for nuke vs wind.

          Right, just like everyone else.

          You can't compare the $/MW of wind vs nuke because they aren't the same the wind power is missing a huge external cost. They aren't the same because the wind is intermittent and you have to add in the price of the NG plants that are running for some percentage of the time. So the minimum cost is the NG plants you need to build to back them up. AKA the minimum price is the average of the NG plants and the wind plus whatever you co

          • Re:What we need to do (Score:4, Informative)

            by AleRunner ( 4556245 ) on Friday June 18, 2021 @03:32PM (#61499632)

            Actually, no, the main cost, not teven included in those calculatoins, of nukes is infrastructure and storage.

            The problem with nuclear power in all of the current generation systems is that they are completely inflexible. In many nuke stations it takes days to even vary average power by a small amount. Complete ramp up or shutdown of a nuclear plant can take a month. Yes, they can be shutdown in minutes in an emergency, but an emergency shutdown is an event that it will take months to recover from. This is often given the misnomer "base load" but really there's no such thing. With about the sole exception of long term processes like Aluminium smelters all electrical load flexes through the day.

            This is where wind power, and even solar wins out. The wind is always blowing somewhere. Wind power is already much cheaper than coal and is becoming orders of magnitude cheaper than nuclear. Remember those costs per MW you quoted? Those already include large amounts of time running below capacity. This means that you can build extra wind capacity which kicks in at moments when the wind is relatively lower and demand is peaking. This means that, compared to a nuclear based grid you can overall reduce the amount of emergency peaker plants.

            This is before you even consider how unreliable nuclear plants are. The entire things often go off simultaneously and they have to shutdown completely in the case of even slight geological activity. If you have a nuclear plant in your grid you have to build the entire grid assuming that the whole thing might disappear instantly. Compare that with wind turbines where tens of them could fail simultaneously, say due to a snall asteroid strike, and you just wouldn't even notice as the thousands of others in the grid took over automatically.

            • With about the sole exception of long term processes like Aluminium smelters all electrical load flexes through the day.
              That has nothing to do with base load.

              Base load is a grid term. Has not really anything to do with customers or plants providing it. Draw a typical load curve of your local are on a sheet of paper.

              Take a ruler and place it horizontally at the lowest point of your load curve. Draw a horizontal line.

              Hatch the area below that line in fancy patterns: that is base load

              And hence you have a small

              • Take a ruler and place it horizontally at the lowest point of your load curve. Draw a horizontal line.

                Hatch the area below that line in fancy patterns: that is base load

                Provided that you have a time machine so you can go 10 year into the future, get a copy of the graph of power usage then this might work fine. You say "Draw a typical load curve of your local are on a sheet of paper." but that's missing the point entirely. If you go below that load curve then you have excess power that you have to dispose of. That's the reason that certain, heavily nuke based, grids have reached the stage of having negative energy prices.

                Base load is a grid term. Has not really anything to do with customers or plants providing it.

                Like much of the current power industry, this has b

          • They aren't the same because the wind is intermittent and you have to add in the price of the NG plants that are running for some percentage of the time.
            That is nonsense. You are probably a paid agitator.
            a) balancing/reserve power plants already exist. There is no need to build one as "backup" for a wind plant
            b) widely distributed wind plants do not need any "backup"

            The rest of your post looks like gibberish, what exactly did you want to say?

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by Uecker ( 1842596 )

            This has nothing to do with external cost. An external cost is something imposed to a third party. That wind is intermittent only means that you have to buy power from some source when the wind is not available. There is no cost to a third party.

            In contrast, nuclear power really has external costs.

      • To solve this problem what we need are a 1970's level of nuke rollout like France.

        That's a great way of solving the problem in 100 years. Right now you'll be lucky to get a single nuke in operation within the next 20 years. That's the state of the industry. While the green energy proponents aren't perfect by any means at least they are proposing something actually buildable rather than a type of plant which has in the past 20 years successfully suck every company in the industry (including those that helped get France to where they were in the 80s like AREVA).

        The choice is yours:
        Build 20

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by bored ( 40072 )

          I will go for the 20 year nuke cycle lets start today.'

          Because the build wind farms plan you have is full of holes.

          • So is your nuke plan. By the time your first nuke is running other forms of green energy will already have compensated for a fuckton of emissions. By the time your first nuke is running you can easily build a far larger supply in green energy. You seem to think that you can build nuclear reactors like you can apartment complexes, my friend you're woefully uninformed. We have a very limited capacity to be able to build nuclear plants in parallel and at the current rate of construction you are literally propo

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by bored ( 40072 )

          Just to add more, wind can't even solve the _current_ electric generation problem, much less the _future_ electric generation problem when we all buy electric cars.

          • wind can't even solve the _current_ electric generation problem

            We've barely even tried. And the reality is no one is proposing wind as the only energy source. That would be stupid. Advancements are happening all the time in green energy. Wind farms getting larger and more efficient, storage is getting cheaper and becoming available at grid scale, solar, biomass, etc is all being actively developed and improved. By contrast each new nuclear plant seems to be more expensive, take longer, and create even more societal and financial problems. We as a society fucked ourselv

          • _current_ electric generation problem
            There is no such thing.
            Every country, or supergrid, produces as much energy as there is needed.

            Otherwise we had: blackouts. Which we obviously do not have.

            _future_ electric generation problem when we all buy electric cars.
            Most people charge at night. At night ordinary (not counting electric cars) power demand is < 40% of the day time usage: there is no problem

            You are just a brainwashed idiot who has no clue about the topic.

      • For every MW of green energy installed we have 3X in NG load following.
        ROFLDIROFLDIROFLDI

        And Germany produces during COVID times 62% of its energy with renewables ... idiot.

        You might want to look up Norway, Denmark, Portugal ...

        Or for that matter: Bangladesh.

        Brining Texas as an example is just retarded, but well, that is how we Europeans perceive you guys anyway.

    • 2 even easier things we can do (Score:4, Interesting)

      by FeelGood314 ( 2516288 ) on Friday June 18, 2021 @11:46AM (#61499010)
      There are even easier ways that save you money.
      1) Advocate for variable energy prices that more closely match the spot price. Your cheapest electricity should be 2 cents a kw/h and on a typical day the peak should be $0.50 to $1. If the price at the plug actually reflected the generation cost people will shift their use. The 2 cheap electricity is always the cleanest, the peak is coal and natural gas peaker plants*. There are many ways people will shift use with minimal discomfort and large savings. Unfortunately in the places I've demonstrated this the savings are for rich people who have big air conditioners or electric heating. In Oklahoma the median saving was $50/month. And then the advocates for the poor got involved. 2) Higher albedo roofs. They last longer, keep your house cooler, keep your neighbourhood cooler and they keep your house warmer at night because they radiate less heat. They even work in cold places like Canada. In December it is mostly dark so less radiating at night is good, in January - March the roofs are white anyway because of snow cover. *No we can't just install more wind and solar. If we took all the new wind installation last year and used it to charge all the batteries produced last year we would charge them all in under 9 minutes.

      • Your cheapest electricity should be 2 cents a kw/h and on a typical day the peak should be $0.50 to $1.
        Even in the US of awesomeness you can not produce 1 kW/h for 2 cents, and most certainly not pipe it through the grid.
        (* facepalm *)

        Snow cover? When was the last time in my latitude that we had snow cover for more than a day or two? Oh, last January ... and before that? So long ago, I can not remember.

    • We are already seeing water shortages, and we're already seeing decreased crop yields. If you're going to make a claim like "that doesn't mean there's nothing we can do" you should provide evidence for that.

      I can provide evidence. Are we reducing the amount of carbon we output every year? No. Are we reducing the 25% of carbon emissions due to industrial farming? No. Is the total amount of greenhouse gas in ppm going down each year? No.

      There is nothing we can do as individuals. It would take governments coop

      • Are we reducing the amount of carbon we output every year?

        Not every year but some years. 2015 saw a net reduction in carbon, and 2020 did as well. In the case of 2020, this was due largely to COVID, so that doesn't count. But 2015 was a reduction. https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions [ourworldindata.org].

        No. Are we reducing the 25% of carbon emissions due to industrial farming? No. Is the total amount of greenhouse gas in ppm going down each year? No.

        We're working on it. But yes, this goes to the issues that we are going to have problems no matter what. What we're doing now is about delaying those issues for as long s we can.

        It would take governments cooperating on a planetary scale to begin reducing our carbon emissions.

        If you think that that needs to be the primary solution, then the second prong, political is most relev

        • OK, I am NOT saying we shouldn't try. I'm just saying I think the odds are against us. That said, given that the alternative is our extinction, I'm all for trying :)

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by serafean ( 4896143 )

      First off, thank you for this positive note about what one can do. I do think however, that the problem isn't identified correctly...

      > If you do need a new car, consider getting an electric car or hybrid.

      Depending on planned use, fixing and using an older car *might* overall be better for the environment. an EURO 6 car should emit 95g/km, en EURO 5 130g/km of CO2.
      The ballpark number of CO2 emissions for EV production I found is 17 tons of CO2. That gives you a ballpark of 100 000km EURO 5 range before th

      • Mostly in agreement. I agree about used cars; my comment was emphasizing if one "needs" to get a new car. (This is also because some people really don't like buying used cars. There's a segment of the population which feels like only the poors do that, so if those people are going to buy a new car no matter what, better they buy the electric.)

        Disagreement about solar and coal. For example, Florida just dismantled one of their last coal plants and are replacing it with solar panels. I agree that no source

      • Depending on planned use, fixing and using an older car *might* overall be better for the environment

        If you aren planning on driving for more than 18 months (before you die and have your car crushed) then an EV is going to be the better option for the environment.

        However, even if you are going to die after 18 months, your EV can be resold for someone else to use. Honestly, the best thing you can do with an older car is to have it recycled.

      • The ballpark number of CO2 emissions for EV production I found is 17 tons of CO2. That gives you a ballpark of 100 000km EURO 5 range before the construction emissions are offset.
        The construction costs in CO2 for an ICE car: are the same.

        Oops

        , that was such a no brainer.

    • If you do need a new car,

      Then don't get one. I remember reading that making a new (gas) car from scratch uses the same energy require to propel that car ~ 50,000 miles. Even if that's off by 50%, that's a lot of energy use. A well-maintained, used car can do the job.

      • Re:New car? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Junta ( 36770 ) on Friday June 18, 2021 @01:42PM (#61499318)

        The auto industry, like a lot of other industries, are not set up to facilitate this well.

        There are various bits of my 2004 vehicle that are broken that I have to leave broken, because parts are no longer made to repair, and they are not so standardized as to be readily replaceable/interchangeable. So I can't just eternally maintain a car, the parts needed to do so no longer are available after some time (worst case 10 years in the US).

        So I could go out and buy a 2015 used car, sure. But I have to acknowledge that for the 2015 used car to exist, *someone* had to have bought a new car in 2015. So I can't say that everyone in the world should only buy used cars.

        It would be nice if car manufacturers settled on their designs such that the difference between a 2004 and a 2014 would be greatly reduced and that 2004 cars could have forwards compatibility with some 2014 advancements (e.g. a lot of the form factors of components changed without any specific reason.

        Incidentally, there are a lot of other products where this could apply. For example, the insulating box of a refrigerator isn't going to go bad, but when it's compressor goes or a control board fails, repair is likely not an option, because the manufacturers have nothing compatible with that fridge being made anymore.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by kackle ( 910159 )
          I hear ya' loud and clear about the automobiles, appliances, etc. Someone should start a new company... ;)

          Regarding the autos, junkyards are often helpful for non-power-train items. Power-train parts are usually available for decades as they are picked up by third-party suppliers. If you want to be extra clever about it, very popular classic cars have most/all of their parts reproduced as new, now several decades later.

  • I know!!! (Score:3)

    by NoNonAlphaCharsHere ( 2201864 ) on Friday June 18, 2021 @11:24AM (#61498938)
    Let's cut Congressional funding to NASA and NOAA so they can't afford to take the satellite measurements - no data, no problem - all groundless speculation.

    • They actually did that (Score:5, Informative)

      by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Friday June 18, 2021 @11:42AM (#61498988)
      there was an article on /. a while back where funding was cut to weather satellites. It's caused massive problems with early warning systems for hurricanes and sever storms. But it also limited the amount of data about climate change's effects.

      The sort of people who don't want to address climate change leave no stone unturned and have billions of dollars to spend because addressing climate change will cost trillions and that money is theirs.
      • Gosh, I wonder if that was my point.
        • Hard to tell in 2021. The scale of the bullshit happening is so vast it's tough to grasp sometimes. That's how Dick Cheney got away with so much. Nobody really believed he was really doing the things he was doing....

    • Let's cut Congressional funding to NASA and NOAA so they can't afford to take the satellite measurements - no data, no problem - all groundless speculation.

      Technically, that would be spaceless speculation.

  • Can't say it is unprecedented (Score:3, Informative)

    by sphealey ( 2855 ) on Friday June 18, 2021 @11:26AM (#61498948)

    IIRC these heat levels were also seen during the Carboniferous Era, so it can't really be said to be unprecedented.

    • Perhaps unprecedented in human history?

    • IIRC these heat levels were also seen during the Carboniferous Era, so it can't really be said to be unprecedented.

      Correct. It is, however, unprecedented in the 12 years of online article history on The Guardian's website.

      • Why the arbirarily low limit? It's unprecedented in The Guardian's 200 year history which is how long they have been writing articles for. Yes that's right it was founded in 1821, though presumably back then they didn't have an RSS feed or popups asking for more money while reading.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by swilver ( 617741 )

      Ah, you have data that it doubled in the span of a human life time during that period?

  • Good news only when we had opposite day.

  • Burning of fossil fuels is all but unavoidable (Score:5, Insightful)

    by OpenSourced ( 323149 ) on Friday June 18, 2021 @12:44PM (#61499158) Journal

    Am I missing something here? Does anybody with an understanding of human nature think that a single barrel of oil or a single ton of coal will remain unburned while there is a financial incentive to extract and burn it? And, if coal is an example, even if there is no financial incentive. That's human nature, we will never sacrifice even a bit of our present comfort for a possible long term big gain. In the long term, the thinking goes, we are all dead.

    • Am I missing something here? Does anybody with an understanding of human nature think that a single barrel of oil or a single ton of coal will remain unburned while there is a financial incentive to extract and burn it?

      How many people do you see riding a horse and cart to work? We don't need to remove the financial incentive, we just need to supersede it with something better. But "better" requires education as well. Such as a friend of mine who swears that the gasoline engine will never be replaced because people like performance cars. Those are the minds we're dealing with, the kind of people who don't realise an EV family sedan can smoke a Porsche 911 GT3 from the starting line. The kind of people who continue to beli

    • Nobel Prize winning economist Elinor Ostrom [wikipedia.org] spent her career studying how and when and why common resources are or aren't managed sustainably. When do you get a tragedy of the commons, and when do you get a sustainably managed commons? As it turns out, tragedies of the common aren't inevitable.

      Lots of fascinating lectures out there by her. I haven't watched this one [youtube.com] yet, but maybe I will now.

  • Won't win til we shift perspective (Score:3)

    by dbrueck ( 1872018 ) on Friday June 18, 2021 @12:54PM (#61499188)

    I'm all for trying to cut emissions, go green on this and that, but I just don't believe that you can - on a global scale - motivate enough people for the common good (see, for example, the last 50 years).

    We should continue to make those efforts, but really I don't see us really solving these problems until more people start to see them as opportunities - specifically, opportunities to make boatloads of money. So instead of "oh no, there is too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere" we need more people to say, "ok, you have a wild abundance of CO2 - how could you take advantage of that?"

    Same with this energy imbalance - we need to focus humanity on creative ways to harvest or otherwise make use of it for some form of personal gain.

  • We have been doing a LOT recently to capture solar energy. Renewables advocates rightly point out that we are doing more to collect solar energy and make it useful for more things than feeding photosynthesis.

    But, it also reduces the amount we reflect or re-radiate back into space. Solar panels themselves get hot, mainly due to the infrared they aren't converting.

    Is that heat being taken into account in the deficit? That amount will only increase as we deploy more solar collectors.And it is a good thing, in

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by swilver ( 617741 )

      Do you have any idea what percentage of the world is covered in solar panels? You'd need 0.1% covered to generate enough power to power the world. We're nowhere close to that, so I think its safe to say this effect is neglible.

    • Yup - the sun-via-solar-to-electricity is ending up producing heat at the end as we we consume this electricity.

      Things to consider:
      - what happens to the solar radiation not captured by panels (turns to heat anyway for most part)
      - what is the ratio of total solar radiation vs what we use today (probably multiple orders of magnitude difference)

      As you say, the point being - we need energy so let's at least let's not cause secondary effects like emitting more green house gases. That's the biggest problem now. L

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