this post was submitted on 03 Jul 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] 2 points 5 months ago

Incredibly detailed article, thanks for sharing. I would like to see more detail on the conversions efficiencies however. We already know the economics of green hydrogen are quite poor without free renewable energy, so adding more conversion steps, accounting for losses and warming impacts from leaks, and then finally burning such fuels, often for low value uses like process heat (steel is another story) seems just awful when we have so much lower hanging fruit to worry about.

Clearly there will be some niche uses for these types of fuels and ergo they must have a pathway to be carbon neutral, but at this stage it all feels like a massive distraction that conveniently preserves existing fossil infrastructure, which will undoubtedly result in it being used for fossil interests in the meantime.