this post was submitted on 13 Sep 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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[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 days ago (1 children)

True no cities are prepared for this, but this is exactly the kind of thing distributed solar helps handle well - heat waves are almost always paired with sunshine. The more distributed solar you get on the grid, the less of an issue this becomes.

Yes, I know you still have power challenges at sunset while its still hot outside, but fortunately that's also when things tend to start cooling off, and you lose one major contributor to heat stress - solar radiation.

It's not a perfect system, batteries could of course help, but it's a major step in the right direction.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

That’s what neighborhood backup batteries are for. Drop some sodium ion battery installations in each district, smooth out the grid and keep it up and running.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

With the current economic model I suspect that to be unaffordable by most of the world governments. The cost of ownership, the initial demand on production, temporary workers, etc.

It may be more realistic to retrofit existing infrastructure such as vacant office buildings into a space capable of comfortably providing for people that rely on electricity to survive.