this post was submitted on 20 Jan 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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The One Climate Policy All 2024 Candidates Support Is Actually Terrible | Ethanol is a comically inefficient form of solar energy—and a toxic one. Solar panels would be better (newrepublic.com)
submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Hydrogen (if we must) for everything above 10k, until we have batteries with weight to performance ratios that can support trucking with electric.

Hydrogen is even dumber than ethanol.

The better solution is to minimize the number of vehicles that need to be long-range and self-powered in the first place by aggressively improving rail infrastructure (including electrifying it), and then run the bit that's left on biodiesel sourced from waste feedstocks.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I mean I only begrudgingly support hydrogen, because in theory, it can be produced by renewables and we do need something more energy dense for things that move heavy things.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The trouble is, hydrogen is really bad at being energy-dense, requiring either cryogenics or dangerously-high pressures to fit enough in an automotive-gas-tank-sized space.

Frankly, if you want to insist using hydrogen, the best thing to do with it would be to react it with CO2 to make synthetic gasoline and use it in the internal-combustion engines and gas stations we already have.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I think you store it in salt.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Not in a car, you don't. You're thinking of proposals to store large amounts of it at rest in former salt mines, but that doesn't help you actually use it in a vehicle.