this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2024
299 points (97.8% liked)

Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.

5197 readers
739 users here now

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:

Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
silence7@slrpnk.net
299
A cargo ship’s ‘WindWing’ sails saved it up to 12 tons of fuel per day (www.popsci.com)
submitted 7 months ago by ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net to c/climate@slrpnk.net
29 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] zaphod@feddit.de 7 points 7 months ago (1 children)

The 12 tons are a best case and they represent 37% of this ship's fuel consumption, that would be ~32.5 tons a day, on average it saved 3.3 tons, ~10%.

[–] Paragone@sh.itjust.works -1 points 7 months ago

Which makes the break-even point for such wingsails, which cost one hell of alot more than a few tonnes of fuel did .. rather far-away/long-term, doesn't it?

There was also a system using huge parachute-kite things, on carbon-nanotube-ropes, fired up into the sky with rocket-assist, and the things could apparently pull the ship, quite effectively...

.. the service-subscription the ship was supposed to pay-for gave them the optimal route for fuel-savings vs time-to-get-there..

here, it was sorta like this, but the kite-sail looked different, and I'm pretty-sure they were saying something about nanotube cable for the kite, and it wasn't just a concept, it was actually-working...

https://marinersgalaxy.com/giant-kite-pulls-ship-across-atlantic/

I seem to remember that at the beginning of covid, some shipping companies just shortened the bulbs on their hulls, to optimize for a slower cruising-speed, and saved money that way..

again, where's the break-even on it