this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023
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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.

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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] 1 points 1 year ago

Yes...and no. It's complicated. I moved from one shitty rental to another, that had a heat pump and tbh when it's not one weather extreme or the other the answer is probably yes. The complicated part is in the rental. You see there are several holes in the home that allow daylight through and thus causes insulation issues. As a result my house heats up every day even with the heat pump running and the heat pump rarely shuts off even during the night (Texas). On the other hand the heat pump consumes roughly 50% the energy my old AC did and unlike my old AC also provides heat which in Texas is enough for 99.5% of the year....though this does mean I have a fairly consistent power bill as a result. The heat pump my rental has isn't very efficient (16 seer I think) and for a while was undercharged. If this house had solar of at least 3kw I think I could run the heat pump on pure solar and never use the grid...but it doesn't.

Again it's complicated, I actually love the heat pump...but it's in a shitty rental. If this were my house we'd probably be having a completely different discussion on performance. I think part of what should happen is the government subsidizing/rewarding landlords for fixing up inefficient homes with updates and for rewarding proper installation of things like heat pumps. I didn't mention this before but the heat pump was not properly installed either. It is mated to the previous A/C air handler and probably has a refrigerant leak as a result.

For what it's worth there's at least two other appliances in my home that should be heat pumps. My dryer, which has horrible ducting issues and consumes massive amounts of electricity and heats the house and pumps the cold air outside. In addition to the dryer I have an electric water heater in the garage that would be fantastic as a heat pump. It would partially cool the garage and most importantly consume some of the heat in the garage for water heating purposes.