this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023
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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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America Needs To Install A Lot More Heat Pumps (www.distilled.earth)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I'll note that this post is paywalled, but the key facts are outside the paywall.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Yes, because they move heat instead of creating it by burning stuff. This lets them be more than 100% efficient. You can expect something like 300% efficiency averaged over a year for air-sourced heat pumps in the US which are sized correctly for the house they're in. This makes them a net benefit, even on the current electrical grid.

People also often choose to add insulation when installing heat pumps, as this has the benefit of lowering overall system cost, which makes the situation even better.