this post was submitted on 02 Mar 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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U.S. Seeks to Boost Nuclear Power After Decades of Inertia | Measures moving through Congress to encourage new reactors are receiving broad bipartisan support (www.nytimes.com)
submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Best time to build a reactor is never. Better to use the fuckton of money for cheaper and better renewables...

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

But then you would need another excuse in ~2 decades but having build not enough expensive nuclear power, still struggling to get the ones in production finished and still burning fossil fuels...

And we all know that destroying the planet for profits is the actual goal here.

The exact same people spending huge sums on deying climate change for decades are now paying for "it's all too late and we are doomed anyway, so why try to do anything" and "nuclear power, especially future designs far from actually being production ready, will safe us" messaging.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Hydro and wind kill more people per terawatt hour. That leaves solar (and possibly tidal as that development ramps up). Putting all your eggs in just one form of renewables (solar) would be an insane risk. Base loads need to be addressed in order to phase out the fossil fuels.

There are more options with modern reactor designs. Small modular reactors can be built and brought online cheaper and faster than previous designs. That would allow a faster ROI (reducing fossil fuel usage faster).

Solar, wind, tidal and nuclear should be scaled simultaneously to reach our goals and not think it's just one or the other.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Wind kills 0.04 per TWH, nuclear 0.03 and solar 0.02. Why is nuclear acceptable for you and wind not?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Wind IS acceptable. Read the last paragraph. The first part of the comment is merely addressing the people that suggest solar only as it's the only source with less attributed deaths per terawatt hour. I'm also partial to the Norwegian hydro model.