If you are anywhere except the west coast in the US, there's no such thing as a perfect climate. And then you have other nasties to deal with like rain for 6 straight months (Portland), block-to-block and hour-to-hour 15-degree weather shifts (SF), filthy air (LA), or climate perfection but total affordability fail (San Diego). And lets not get into wildfires, earthquakes, mudslides, and the like.
They weren't binding to the US, because the US never approved the accords. Had the accords been ratified, they certainly would have been binding. We have no disagreement if you are just saying that they were never ratified and therefore were never binding. We do have a disagreement if you say they would not have been binding in the event that they were ratified.
Context, New Jersey. That's Fahrenheit. I could live in Wisconsin or something where it regularly goes below zero and which scale you use no longer matters - but not many people choose to do that.
Yeah, we all make fun of Jersey until it's 10 degrees out and everyone is sitting in their warm car in NJ while the rest of us are standing in the cold.
I think you have the timeline screwed up a little. The Senate passed the Byrd-Hagel Resolution in 1997 and Clinton didn't sign the Kyoto Protocol until 1998. He knew it was a loser and never submitted it to the Senate. Everyone, including Clinton, agreed that it would have needed to be ratified in order to become binding.
Again, not my field of expertise but I think Kyoto was binding.
I'm definitely not surprised by Trump's actions, and in fact he is making good on his campaign rhetoric/promises. If you want your policies to be enacted you need to win an election from time to time.
Well, perhaps it would have helped if Obama had not unilaterally made that promise without consulting the legislative branch of government.
This is a beef I have with congress. They have given up a lot of power over the years to avoid making politically difficult decisions. I can hardly blame Obama for using this power to keep his own campaign promises. The UNFCCC gave up a shit-ton of congressional power by offloading future economic policy into a UN framework. Even though I said I thought withdrawing from the Paris deal was a political mistake, now that it's done I'd have preferred he withdraw from UNFCCC entirely to dump climate policy back in congress's lap where it belongs.
It is past time for other countries to realize that if the President does not get the Senate to ratify his promise, he is only committing the U.S. to it until the next election.
Yes. It's notable that Japan also only has "approved" the agreement.
It's not my mind. I'm not making up any facts. It was a non-binding agreement. Just a promise. I think Trump breaking that promise is bad for the image of the US, that's all. That part is my opinion.
I would even say that the USA pretty much has the perfect latitude, as a whole.
It's not that simple - the US is huge and has almost every climate. Norway is fairly large but not geographically diverse. If you compare Norway to the parts of the US that resemble Norway, then you don't have such a crazy disparity. Oslo and Houston are just too different to try and compare. I tried to use NYC because it is very urban and has a similar-ish climate. Still, it has older housing stock and older infrastructure.
In 2011, the most recent year for which data is available, the average New Yorker consumed 121 MMBtu in total source energy, which includes fuel for transportation and heating as well as electricity.
(note this report also collaborates what you said about heating vs. cooling in the NYC climate: "Heating makes up the largest share of in-building energy use in NYC, while cooling makes up the lowest single category")
I'm having trouble finding Oslo total per-capita energy usage. Presumably it is lower than the country at large. From Google's magic data-mining I see that Norwegians each use 232.MMBtu of energy - significantly more than New Yorkers. In fact, the US numbers aren't really that horrifyingly different at 274.49 MMBtu.
The problem is that people in the USA use way to much gas in their way to big cars.
Yes, much of the population is in that situation. Much of it is not - you paint with too broad a brush. If there is a silver lining, it's that small changes in car fleet efficiency result in large drops in fuel usage. Cars are low-hanging fruit and CAFE standards have been pretty effective.
The problem is that you need a backup heater for cases when the temperature drop below about -15 C. Because of that, a minority of houses have a heat pump in cold climates.
Yes, the context of that comment was the South. I'm in Philly and heat pumps are marginal - I don't have one but some people do. South of me they are quite economical.
No I meant in a place with only the occasional cold snap, the payback on the $1000 would be a long time. If you regularly use heat of any type, the heat pump would be a no-brainer.
The 29 degree spread of Oslo (vs 33 in Philly) doesn't explain why they emit half the CO2 of the average US person.
True, but it's not going to be one thing. Another is demographics and geography... compare Oslo to New Yorkers and the CO2 usage is about double for NY. Stacking people in buildings is a very efficient way to heat and cool - minimal surface area. Subways are electric, and NY gets most of its energy from nuclear, natural gas, and hydro. Norway, on the other hand is blessed with ample hydro power - 98% of the country's usage! That solution obviously is not applicable to everywhere. You have to be careful when comparing cities, because the comparison with Oslo only gets you so far. Norwegians could literally heat the streets and as long as they are using only electricity they will never emit any carbon - we can't use carbon as a proxy for energy usage.
I'm laughing because the guy was being sarcastic and they took him seriously. Very West Coast. He's making fun of the trivial problem of describing a vehicle's motion in an intersection by comparing it to the difficult problem that he is trained for (speaker dynamics), and they took his statement as a claim that his electronics degree made him an expert in vehicle dynamics.
Nordic countries have low population density, harsh winters, prosperous economy and pollute far less per capita (around half I think).
Because they can gear up their insulated houses and buildings for winter and hardly ever run the AC, if it even exists. This actually contradicts your opening statement. Norway also has a fairly mild climate in the places that people tend to live. Look at the averages for Oslo. The coldest average lows are -7 in Jan-Feb. The warmest average high is 22 in July.
If you are happy with 21 degrees inside, than you don't need to install AC at all. Your heat in the worst month is only going to need to make up for a 28 degree delta. Compare this to someone who lives in Philly (where I live). Philly has very mild weather for the US since it is on the coast. But despite being 20 degrees latitude south of Oslo, the coldest months are only 5 degrees warmer at -2. The hottest month has an average high of 31. That's a 33 degree spread vs the Norwegian 29 degree spread. Go to Houston (about the size of Philly) and you get a 41 degree spread. The point is, the populous US cities are actually dealing with a more extreme environment than the Nordic countries: Chicago - 40 degrees, New York - 32 degrees, Atlanta - 32 degrees, Boston - 33 degrees, Phoenix - 37 degrees. You need to go out to the West Coast to get milder climates: LA - 20 degrees, San Francisco - 16 degrees, Portland - 25 degrees.
The other thing you need to consider is the sun beating on the house. You aren't just cooling your house from the ambient, you are also fighting the sun. The sun helps you in the winter. This effect is going to be much stronger in the lower latitudes, so that's going to make cooling harder the further south you go - where you most need it. Heating in the South is usually an afterthought - they don't have that much delta to overcome and the strong sun quickly brings the daytime temperatures back up. In some parts of the south they won't even bother making the AC heat pump reversible and will instead just turn on the "emergency heat" when there is the rare cold snap. You'd need to use a LOT of resistive heat to pay the extra $1000 or so for the reversible heat pump.
I have a friend who is a vegan for environmental and ethical reasons, yet she has a dog that eats meat and has the same carbon footprint as an SUV. Everyone justifies their shit. At the end of the day there is a limited amount you can do locally. Keep your own neighborhood clean and pollutant free. Large, strategic changes need to come at the societal level. We've had fantastic success with market-driven pollutant credit systems. Not sure where the sudden opposition to these comes from just because it is carbon. I think it is more about tribal politics than any kind of coherent ideology.
Both candidates were unbelievable egotists... it's hard to even compare them because I think we reached peak, saturated ego. With that said, what I heard from the Hillary Camp was roughly: "ME ME ME NOT TRUMP ME ME ME ME NOT TRUMP" and almost no other messaging. Trump did not have anything approaching a coherent message. I'm not sure he had a coherent thought. But his message was roughly: "ME ME ME EVIL HILLARY JOBS JOBS SAFETY SAFETY ME ME ME EVIL HILLARY". Notice that, even while yelling about himself and his opponent, he was throwing stuff out there about jobs and safety. His solutions (in so much as they exist) for jobs and safety are deeply flawed, but at least it was a main thrust of his campaign. Don't get me wrong... it was an extremely close election and Hillary may be technically correct that her behavior did not cost her the election. But it was a factor, and the same can be said of all the other causes. This thing should not have been close at all, and she and the DNC really blew it on multiple fronts.
With that said, early Android was an interface nightmare, too. It was 2-3 years before it was on-par with the iPhone (maybe even before it was really usable?). WebOS (which oddly still lives on in TVs), and MS both gave early Android a good run feature-wise, but they were not free as in beer.
They looked a hundreds of trees and picked the ones that showed the growth pattern they wanted.
Kind of like how you are picking and choosing evidence of fraud to make your point?
HOW MUCH of MY MONEY do they want to TAKE for this?
That's a reasonable opinion to have, but is separate from the science part. If you are arguing from a position of scientific ignorance, I can't take your opinion seriously. If you are saying, yes, this bad stuff will happen but it's still worth it because xxx, then it's a more informed opinion.
Small Thorium reactors scattered across the country would make loads of sense.
Also reasonable, but totally separate from climate science.
People with "Electric" cars are a joke, when the exhaust is at a coal power plant.
It rather depends on your electricity source, doesn't it? For example, here in PA you can buy your power from renewables if you so desire. Presumably, someone who is spending the extra cash to get an electric car is also willing to spend a little more for wind, solar, or hydro.
OK, so I can go by the "Attila Dimedici" analysis of the treaty or I can go with the established and practiced analysis of the treaty. Show me where the legality of the UNFCCC treaty or the Paris agreement is in question, besides in your post? The Paris agreement is not even a binding commitment.
There is a little room for optimism... unlike other animals we develop technology. Fossil fuels are a limited resource... at a certain point, our reliance on them will not be feasible as they become too rare to affordably burn. At that point, our ability to further damage the atmosphere will greatly diminish. We saw a hint of this right before fracking was invented, where oil prices were so high that it was starting to push things like electric cars into economic feasibility. Oil will once again resume its upward march in price as the market corrects, and we'll see that pressure again.
Another place for optimism is that, in countries with Western standards of living, people don't have babies at a rate capable of sustaining a stable population. This mean that if we can somehow manage to get people relatively comfortable, the overpopulation problem will take care of itself.
Being licensed FOR FREE is the essential part. There were a handful of mature mobile OSes at the time, some much more mature. But none that were free to use and modify. Microsoft and Palm were both happy to license you for a fee. Maemo and Blackberry had proprietary solutions ahead of even iPhone. (Technically I think Maemo was "open source", but I don't think all of it was free to sell. Like Android, it had a Linux kernel.)
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If you can afford a nice place in San Diego, I'm legit jealous.
If you are anywhere except the west coast in the US, there's no such thing as a perfect climate. And then you have other nasties to deal with like rain for 6 straight months (Portland), block-to-block and hour-to-hour 15-degree weather shifts (SF), filthy air (LA), or climate perfection but total affordability fail (San Diego). And lets not get into wildfires, earthquakes, mudslides, and the like.
My main processor is thousands of hand-wire-wrapped transistors on a table-sized circuit board.
They weren't binding to the US, because the US never approved the accords. Had the accords been ratified, they certainly would have been binding. We have no disagreement if you are just saying that they were never ratified and therefore were never binding. We do have a disagreement if you say they would not have been binding in the event that they were ratified.
Context, New Jersey. That's Fahrenheit. I could live in Wisconsin or something where it regularly goes below zero and which scale you use no longer matters - but not many people choose to do that.
Yeah, we all make fun of Jersey until it's 10 degrees out and everyone is sitting in their warm car in NJ while the rest of us are standing in the cold.
Not explicitly, but "reducing labor costs" certainly is. And a good thing, too, or we'd all be subsistence farmers.
I think you have the timeline screwed up a little. The Senate passed the Byrd-Hagel Resolution in 1997 and Clinton didn't sign the Kyoto Protocol until 1998. He knew it was a loser and never submitted it to the Senate. Everyone, including Clinton, agreed that it would have needed to be ratified in order to become binding.
Again, not my field of expertise but I think Kyoto was binding.
I'm definitely not surprised by Trump's actions, and in fact he is making good on his campaign rhetoric/promises. If you want your policies to be enacted you need to win an election from time to time.
Well, perhaps it would have helped if Obama had not unilaterally made that promise without consulting the legislative branch of government.
This is a beef I have with congress. They have given up a lot of power over the years to avoid making politically difficult decisions. I can hardly blame Obama for using this power to keep his own campaign promises. The UNFCCC gave up a shit-ton of congressional power by offloading future economic policy into a UN framework. Even though I said I thought withdrawing from the Paris deal was a political mistake, now that it's done I'd have preferred he withdraw from UNFCCC entirely to dump climate policy back in congress's lap where it belongs.
It is past time for other countries to realize that if the President does not get the Senate to ratify his promise, he is only committing the U.S. to it until the next election.
Yes. It's notable that Japan also only has "approved" the agreement.
It's not my mind. I'm not making up any facts. It was a non-binding agreement. Just a promise. I think Trump breaking that promise is bad for the image of the US, that's all. That part is my opinion.
I would even say that the USA pretty much has the perfect latitude, as a whole.
It's not that simple - the US is huge and has almost every climate. Norway is fairly large but not geographically diverse. If you compare Norway to the parts of the US that resemble Norway, then you don't have such a crazy disparity. Oslo and Houston are just too different to try and compare. I tried to use NYC because it is very urban and has a similar-ish climate. Still, it has older housing stock and older infrastructure.
From this document:
(note this report also collaborates what you said about heating vs. cooling in the NYC climate: "Heating makes up the largest share of in-building energy use in NYC, while cooling makes up the lowest single category")
I'm having trouble finding Oslo total per-capita energy usage. Presumably it is lower than the country at large. From Google's magic data-mining I see that Norwegians each use 232.MMBtu of energy - significantly more than New Yorkers. In fact, the US numbers aren't really that horrifyingly different at 274.49 MMBtu.
The problem is that people in the USA use way to much gas in their way to big cars.
Yes, much of the population is in that situation. Much of it is not - you paint with too broad a brush. If there is a silver lining, it's that small changes in car fleet efficiency result in large drops in fuel usage. Cars are low-hanging fruit and CAFE standards have been pretty effective.
The problem is that you need a backup heater for cases when the temperature drop below about -15 C.
Because of that, a minority of houses have a heat pump in cold climates.
Yes, the context of that comment was the South. I'm in Philly and heat pumps are marginal - I don't have one but some people do. South of me they are quite economical.
No I meant in a place with only the occasional cold snap, the payback on the $1000 would be a long time. If you regularly use heat of any type, the heat pump would be a no-brainer.
The 29 degree spread of Oslo (vs 33 in Philly) doesn't explain why they emit half the CO2 of the average US person.
True, but it's not going to be one thing. Another is demographics and geography... compare Oslo to New Yorkers and the CO2 usage is about double for NY. Stacking people in buildings is a very efficient way to heat and cool - minimal surface area. Subways are electric, and NY gets most of its energy from nuclear, natural gas, and hydro. Norway, on the other hand is blessed with ample hydro power - 98% of the country's usage! That solution obviously is not applicable to everywhere. You have to be careful when comparing cities, because the comparison with Oslo only gets you so far. Norwegians could literally heat the streets and as long as they are using only electricity they will never emit any carbon - we can't use carbon as a proxy for energy usage.
I'm laughing because the guy was being sarcastic and they took him seriously. Very West Coast. He's making fun of the trivial problem of describing a vehicle's motion in an intersection by comparing it to the difficult problem that he is trained for (speaker dynamics), and they took his statement as a claim that his electronics degree made him an expert in vehicle dynamics.
Nordic countries have low population density, harsh winters, prosperous economy and pollute far less per capita (around half I think).
Because they can gear up their insulated houses and buildings for winter and hardly ever run the AC, if it even exists. This actually contradicts your opening statement. Norway also has a fairly mild climate in the places that people tend to live. Look at the averages for Oslo. The coldest average lows are -7 in Jan-Feb. The warmest average high is 22 in July.
If you are happy with 21 degrees inside, than you don't need to install AC at all. Your heat in the worst month is only going to need to make up for a 28 degree delta. Compare this to someone who lives in Philly (where I live). Philly has very mild weather for the US since it is on the coast. But despite being 20 degrees latitude south of Oslo, the coldest months are only 5 degrees warmer at -2. The hottest month has an average high of 31. That's a 33 degree spread vs the Norwegian 29 degree spread. Go to Houston (about the size of Philly) and you get a 41 degree spread. The point is, the populous US cities are actually dealing with a more extreme environment than the Nordic countries: Chicago - 40 degrees, New York - 32 degrees, Atlanta - 32 degrees, Boston - 33 degrees, Phoenix - 37 degrees. You need to go out to the West Coast to get milder climates: LA - 20 degrees, San Francisco - 16 degrees, Portland - 25 degrees.
The other thing you need to consider is the sun beating on the house. You aren't just cooling your house from the ambient, you are also fighting the sun. The sun helps you in the winter. This effect is going to be much stronger in the lower latitudes, so that's going to make cooling harder the further south you go - where you most need it. Heating in the South is usually an afterthought - they don't have that much delta to overcome and the strong sun quickly brings the daytime temperatures back up. In some parts of the south they won't even bother making the AC heat pump reversible and will instead just turn on the "emergency heat" when there is the rare cold snap. You'd need to use a LOT of resistive heat to pay the extra $1000 or so for the reversible heat pump.
I have a friend who is a vegan for environmental and ethical reasons, yet she has a dog that eats meat and has the same carbon footprint as an SUV. Everyone justifies their shit. At the end of the day there is a limited amount you can do locally. Keep your own neighborhood clean and pollutant free. Large, strategic changes need to come at the societal level. We've had fantastic success with market-driven pollutant credit systems. Not sure where the sudden opposition to these comes from just because it is carbon. I think it is more about tribal politics than any kind of coherent ideology.
Posting to undo an accidental mod down.
Both candidates were unbelievable egotists... it's hard to even compare them because I think we reached peak, saturated ego. With that said, what I heard from the Hillary Camp was roughly: "ME ME ME NOT TRUMP ME ME ME ME NOT TRUMP" and almost no other messaging. Trump did not have anything approaching a coherent message. I'm not sure he had a coherent thought. But his message was roughly: "ME ME ME EVIL HILLARY JOBS JOBS SAFETY SAFETY ME ME ME EVIL HILLARY". Notice that, even while yelling about himself and his opponent, he was throwing stuff out there about jobs and safety. His solutions (in so much as they exist) for jobs and safety are deeply flawed, but at least it was a main thrust of his campaign. Don't get me wrong... it was an extremely close election and Hillary may be technically correct that her behavior did not cost her the election. But it was a factor, and the same can be said of all the other causes. This thing should not have been close at all, and she and the DNC really blew it on multiple fronts.
You are correct - Apple changed everything.
With that said, early Android was an interface nightmare, too. It was 2-3 years before it was on-par with the iPhone (maybe even before it was really usable?). WebOS (which oddly still lives on in TVs), and MS both gave early Android a good run feature-wise, but they were not free as in beer.
I did look up global emissions before I replied to you, and I'm not finding data that corroborates your post. I find the opposite.
They looked a hundreds of trees and picked the ones that showed the growth pattern they wanted.
Kind of like how you are picking and choosing evidence of fraud to make your point?
HOW MUCH of MY MONEY do they want to TAKE for this?
That's a reasonable opinion to have, but is separate from the science part. If you are arguing from a position of scientific ignorance, I can't take your opinion seriously. If you are saying, yes, this bad stuff will happen but it's still worth it because xxx, then it's a more informed opinion.
Small Thorium reactors scattered across the country would make loads of sense.
Also reasonable, but totally separate from climate science.
People with "Electric" cars are a joke, when the exhaust is at a coal power plant.
It rather depends on your electricity source, doesn't it? For example, here in PA you can buy your power from renewables if you so desire. Presumably, someone who is spending the extra cash to get an electric car is also willing to spend a little more for wind, solar, or hydro.
OK, so I can go by the "Attila Dimedici" analysis of the treaty or I can go with the established and practiced analysis of the treaty. Show me where the legality of the UNFCCC treaty or the Paris agreement is in question, besides in your post? The Paris agreement is not even a binding commitment.
There is a little room for optimism... unlike other animals we develop technology. Fossil fuels are a limited resource... at a certain point, our reliance on them will not be feasible as they become too rare to affordably burn. At that point, our ability to further damage the atmosphere will greatly diminish. We saw a hint of this right before fracking was invented, where oil prices were so high that it was starting to push things like electric cars into economic feasibility. Oil will once again resume its upward march in price as the market corrects, and we'll see that pressure again.
Another place for optimism is that, in countries with Western standards of living, people don't have babies at a rate capable of sustaining a stable population. This mean that if we can somehow manage to get people relatively comfortable, the overpopulation problem will take care of itself.
Being licensed FOR FREE is the essential part. There were a handful of mature mobile OSes at the time, some much more mature. But none that were free to use and modify. Microsoft and Palm were both happy to license you for a fee. Maemo and Blackberry had proprietary solutions ahead of even iPhone. (Technically I think Maemo was "open source", but I don't think all of it was free to sell. Like Android, it had a Linux kernel.)
Semantics. It's part of the UNFCCC treaty ratified in 1992, and that treaty is one of those that Trump is rumored to be withdrawing from.