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] 0 points 1 year ago

The answer is always yes. Heat pumps produce more energy transfer than they consume, giving you higher performance per input.

If you have a natural source of renewable heat (geothermal, solar, etc) then the heat pump only needs to be installed properly to supplement that primary heat source or leverage the heat source (if it’s not capable of being the primary source)

You could argue that it is less beneficial if you get electricity from a coal plant but could heat directly with natural gas or oil. The long term benefit comes from the heat pump’s ability to use any fuel without you spending a dime on new equipment. For example - a 92% AFUE gas furnace or high efficiency oil furnace will never pollute less than the day it’s installed. An electric heat pump may not be ideal when you are fueling it with coal, but when that source gives way to nuclear, solar, or wind your installed heating device will instantly be better (than the gas or oil fueled system) without spending a single cent on your local equipment.