this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2024
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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.

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Yes, heat pumps slash emissions even if powered by a dirty grid | Installing a heat pump now is better for the climate, even on U.S. electricity generated mostly by fossil fuels. Here’s why (www.canarymedia.com)
submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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The article doesn't go into it, but a key advantage they have is that heat pumps move heat, rather then trying to generate it. So they can move a lot more heat into your house than would be generated by running the electricity they use through a resistor. This makes them effectively more than 100% efficient (the exact amount depends on temperature) as compared with burning a fuel or resistive heat.

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

As a warm blooded, middle east dwelling humanoid, WTF is '6000 heating deg days'?

I have concluded that the 6000 is not days in a year or degrees of temperature.

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

To determine heating degree days for your area, you set a baseline temperature (18C is kind of standard in Canada) take the average temperature on each day, and sum the difference between that and the baseline temperature for every day of the year (zero if temp is above baseline). So if the average temp one day was -10C, it would be a 28 heating degree day.

It allows approximation of building heating demand. Some standards (Passive House) use heating degree hours for finer detail, which makes sense because there can be fairly significant day/night temperature swings.

Here's a site where you can calculate what your location is. And here's what Wikipedia says.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Huh, TIL...