this post was submitted on 06 Dec 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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For a Thing That Will Supposedly Fix the Climate, AI Sure Needs a Lot of Fossil Fuels (www.splinter.com)
submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

Plants that take ten years to build don’t seem like a very good response to a boom that measures dataceneter build time in months and will probably collapse in a year or two as hype is replaced by the reality of the technology. Battery backed solar and wind on the other hand are both cheaper, and can be built faster than the ‘AI’ datacenters they are ment to power.

Don’t get me wrong, I think nuclear power is important to the energy transition, and will find its use in certain use cases like large scale marine transport or places near the artic circle, but the window to build it was 1970 to 2010. At a point when the biggest thing slowing down green energy if finding financing for it, it makes sense to go with the lowest cost option available, which is battery backed solar.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

10 years is unrealistic, today it's closer to 15 years. Both time frames would be too late. Doesn't matter either way though since the US elections. The world is not going to be able to compensate for the US emissions under Trump's fascism when we were already on our way to 3 degrees globally BEFORE that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Plants take 10 year to build because of a purposely complicated burocratic process. We churn out at least 1 nuclear submarines a year.

Edit: I still think you're right, renewables and batteries are cheaper than nuclear in most first world countries, but the building process doesn't have to be that long.