this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
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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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[–] greengnu@slrpnk.net 4 points 1 year ago (14 children)

storage is only a problem if the global distribution grid is not created. The sun is always shining somewhere, especially if you realize we can leverage space to extend our collection.

cranes are just stupid energy storage (the F=ma bit basically makes this a non-starter) . Water in pumped storage only works out in huge scale (where you have mountains to provide a massive storage pool).

compressed air storage misses the point, use just a little more energy and you can use that energy to thermally separate CO2 from air. (This is a productive use of energy but bad efficiency for storage)

hydrogen production from water is a productive use if we want to remove hydrocarbons from some chemical processes but it is not an efficient battery.

Thermal storage of energy is very inefficient and not a good idea unless you are willing to waste a good deal of available energy.

And flywheels are not even mentioned and very wrong information about Tesla power walls.

[–] TheBurlapBandit@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] greengnu@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There are a great many "promising" technologies in the pipeline, the real question is which of them actually suit our needs and only via real world trials will we discover the flaws and see if the benefits outweigh the flaws.

[–] TheBurlapBandit@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

They're doing a 300kWh install this year so hopefully that goes well

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