Long hot summer

[PassedOut]

Looks like 2010 will be the hottest year on record and climate change is hitting the arctic particularly hard. But because politicians in the US are bought and paid for by companies that profit from pollution, another year will go by without dealing with emissions. So I appreciated this quote from Canadian Thomas Homer-Dixon, written aboard the Louis S. St-Laurent, Disaster at the Top of the World:

 

Policy makers need to accept that societies won’t make drastic changes to address climate change until such a crisis hits. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing for them to do in the meantime. When a crisis does occur, the societies with response plans on the shelf will be far better off than those that are blindsided. The task for national and regional leaders, then, is to develop a set of contingency plans for possible climate shocks — what we might call, collectively, Plan Z.

The US didn't do well with Katrina nor with the BP oil spill. Other countries -- Russia, Pakistan, and China, for example -- have their hands full with their own environmental catastrophes.

 

We can't give up on efforts to rein in emissions, but in the meantime it makes sense to plan for the crisis situations that all but the most obtuse can see coming. It's something we can pressure our representatives about, and this is a good year to apply that pressure.

[kenberg]

I am pretty much a pessimist. What is needed is a worldwide view holding that we are not the Inheritors of the Earth, we are the Trustees for the Earth. Lots of luck on that one.

 

 

Preparing for disaster is probably better than not preparing for disaster but it won't stop it from being a disaster.

[PassedOut]

I am pretty much a pessimist. What is needed is a worldwide view holding that we are not the Inheritors of the Earth, we are the Trustees for the Earth. Lots of luck on that one.

 

Preparing for disaster is probably better than not preparing for disaster but it won't stop it from being a disaster.

Sadly, I agree with this completely. And I've already had a full, wonderful life, as have you. But I hate that we are passing a completely forseeable disaster on to everyone's kids and grandkids, and want to take any practical steps, no matter how modest, to mitigate the effects on them.

[hrothgar]

Seem to recall that discussion about this topic are one of the few things that are out of bounds on the Water Cooler.

 

(BTW, things have seemed a bit more pleasant since said changes were introduced)

[JoAnneM]

I helped a little, I love my new Prius.

[mike777]

I helped a little, I love my new Prius.

I do wonder what the carbon footprint was for getting the materials, shipping them, putting them together to build the Prius and generate the fuel. Also I wonder about the carbon footprint that went into the roads it drives on.

 

In any event having a choice is good, making the taxpayers help pay for any car is bad.

[ArtK78]

While there was a lot of screaming and carrying on, I don't see that the response to the BP oil spill was inadequate.

 

Unless you mean to imply that the only proper response would be to concentrate 100% of the resources of the entire nation on the oil spill ignoring all else.

 

Unlike the Katrina debacle, there was an immediate response to the crisis. Whether it was adequate or appropriate is something that can be argued about, but there is no doubt that the problem was not ignored.

 

One could argue that the problem existed only because of a lack of oversight caused by the regulatory "reforms" of the prior administration.

[luke warm]

While there was a lot of screaming and carrying on, I don't see that the response to the BP oil spill was inadequate.

it wasn't, imo... that's the minority view down here though

One could argue that the problem existed only because of a lack of oversight caused by the regulatory "reforms" of the prior administration.

it's only been a couple years, i imagine blaming bush for things will stop one day...

[OleBerg]

The problem is capitalism.

 

Whenever this topics is described, an Indian quote springs to mind. It goes something like this:

 

"Only when the last river runs dry, and the last fish is eaten, will the white man acknowledge, that you cannot eat money."

 

And surely enough, the day the Earth ends in environmental disaster, there will still be people rejoicing in the fact, that they have blue numbers on the bottom line.

[JoAnneM]

Where is the list of things that are out of bounds - what changes, when? :P

[Elianna]

The problem is capitalism.

I'm not so sure of that. I think that the problem is that no one owns these resources/Earth, and so they are completely free to use. I think that if there were a major fee for polluting that governments across the globe enforced, we might be doing better. In other words, I view this as a classic Tragedy of the Commons situation, and think that there could be solutions within capitalism to solve it, instead of saying that it's the system's problem, oh well.

[helene_t]

Agree with Elianna.

[Lobowolf]

Whether it was adequate or appropriate is something that can be argued about

Wow, whom do you have ready to take the side that it was adequate and appropriate?

[Phil]

Pretty hot today in OC (95 I think) but this year up until about the middle of July, Southern California was unseasonably cool. As a matter of fact there were a few days in July that were downright COLD.

 

I know the east has been blistering all summer. I don't know what was prevalent in other parts of the world. If anyone says the planet was 1 degree hotter this year than an average of the past 50, I don't doubt them.

 

Personally, if you want to use a short-term trend (i.e., this summer) to advance a cause, I don't have a problem with it, but as long as there isn't an alarmist ring to it.

 

In other news, Proposition 23 is 48-30 against.

[PassedOut]

While there was a lot of screaming and carrying on, I don't see that the response to the BP oil spill was inadequate.

 

Unless you mean to imply that the only proper response would be to concentrate 100% of the resources of the entire nation on the oil spill ignoring all else.

I mean that when forseeable disasters do occur, plans should be in place to deal with them. It shouldn't be necessary to waste time figuring out what to do while the disaster gets worse.

[Winstonm]

Pretty hot today in OC (95 I think) but this year up until about the middle of July, Southern California was unseasonably cool. As a matter of fact there were a few days in July that were downright COLD.

 

I know the east has been blistering all summer. I don't know what was prevalent in other parts of the world. If anyone says the planet was 1 degree hotter this year than an average of the past 50, I don't doubt them.

 

Personally, if you want to use a short-term trend (i.e., this summer) to advance a cause, I don't have a problem with it, but as long as there isn't an alarmist ring to it.

 

In other news, Proposition 23 is 48-30 against.

California, where they care more about the sexual orientation of engaged couples than they do the environment.....

[Lobowolf]

Uh...riiiiiiiiiiight. And how are are the gay marriage and global warming bills coming along in Oklahoma?

[y66]

We've had a few hot spells here in Virginia. Right now it's very pleasant and I am in no rush for summer to end.

 

I don't know why anyone in their right mind thinks policy makers are going to solve this problem. I have not observed that they get elected for making constituents do things they clearly aren't interested in doing.

[jjbrr]

106 everyday for the past few weeks in dallas.

 

dont complain.

[Winstonm]

Uh...riiiiiiiiiiight.  And how are are the gay marriage and global warming bills coming along in Oklahoma?

Ask Oklahoma Senator Inhofe - he will tell you there is no such thing - on either subject. :P

[onoway]

There was a news item today that an oil eating bacteria has unexpectedly shown up in the Gulf and presumably is happilly chomping away on the 23 miles or whatever of drifting semidispersed oil that is left of the BP blowout. This seems to be mixed good and bad news..good for obvious reasons and bad in that now oil companies will feel more relaxed about having another blowout or spill ...it is interesting (depressing) to wonder just how bad such a thing would have to be before governments (including the Canadian govt) decided that drilling in vulnerable areas should be disallowed.

[y66]

Another item of possible interest in todays news:

 

Jason Pontin, the editor in chief of Technology Review, recently spoke with Bill Gates about everything from software entrepreneurship to promoting polio vaccination in northern Nigeria. But the heart of the conversation, published today on the magazine’s Web site, was about how to make non-polluting energy technologies so cheap that coal reverts to being the shiny black rock it was before the industrial revolution.

 

... more

Perhaps this comment was motivated by earlier comments on this thread:

 

On the other hand, the way capitalism works is that it systematically underfunds innovation, because the innovators can’t reap the full benefits. But there’s actually a net benefit to society being more R&D-oriented. And that’s why in health research, governments do fund R&D.

[y66]

Cap-and-Trade is Dead; Long Live Cap-and-Trade

 

Good analysis by Nate Silver. I see his blog moved to a new location yesterday.

[hrothgar]

A (potentially) interesting aside which I discovered this week:

 

One of the things that I was working on last year was applying various statistics and optimization techniques to embedded designs.

 

Let's assume that you're building an embedded controller that is governing how an engine runs. You need to change the behaviour of the engine based on a large set of (correlated) dependent variables.

 

Here's the catch... Your embedded controller is limited, both in terms of RAM and processing power. Even though you might have 50 different independent variables, you can only afford enough memory to use 12 of them and you'd really like to shrink this down to 8 or 9. In a similar vein, you could try to deal with the multicollinearity by running a PCA on your data, however, if you do this, you're going to burn a lot of processing power.

 

One of our customers really liked some of the techniques that we came up with and is deploying improved algorithms in some of their new products. They were able to use them to make very significant reductions in the amount of CO2 that was being emitted by some big, dirty engines.

 

Always nice when some of the stuff that you work on has a practical impact...

[PassedOut]

One of our customers really liked some of the techniques that we came up with and is deploying improved algorithms in some of their new products. They were able to use them to make very significant reductions in the amount of CO2 that was being emitted by some big, dirty engines.

 

Always nice when some of the stuff that you work on has a practical impact...

Nice combination: interesting work with a positive effect on the world. Life at its best. Thanks for mentioning it.