this post was submitted on 12 Aug 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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Nights in Las Vegas Are Becoming Dangerously Hot (www.nytimes.com)
submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

At an individual level sure, it's easy to throw on a blanket when it's cold. But at a household level, much more energy is used to heat homes.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-10/why-we-always-fight-over-air-conditioning

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Interesting article!

Its pretty US centric though so I think one would have to contrast that against the UK and Europe which generally has homes that are brick and concrete rather than lumber, we also have (I believe) tighter insulation regulations and - just generally - vastly smaller homes.

I think if US houses were built to European regs and sizes then the numbers would look much different.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Also, most existing homes were built when energy was very nearly free, so that there was no incentive to be efficient.