this post was submitted on 11 May 2024
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Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.

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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world. About 1C of total warming. Second chart: about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability. Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases. About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:

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The world’s largest direct carbon capture plant just went online (www.engadget.com)
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[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago

The worst part is, one of the "downsides" of renewables like wind and solar is curtailment. A "problem" that needs to be fixed is that they sometimes produce excess energy that you end up having to simply discard if demand isn't there. This is often invoked disingenuously by the allies of apocalypse as some major problem with the tech -- that building enough renewables to basically cover regular power requirements would entail having hugely excess production that gets curtailed, which is somehow wasteful.

DAC and green hydrogen are ways to eat up excess supply and reap benefit from it and should be categorized in similar veins to other forms of energy storage. They are both undeniably necessary technologies to achieve overall goals. Can either solve the problem on their own? God no. But who's saying they can?