this post was submitted on 21 Jul 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.

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Hops for beer flourish under solar panels. They're not the only crop thriving in the shade. (apnews.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[โ€“] schroedingershat 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

It's bs pearl clutching about lead or bismuth solder somehow teleporting through glass. Even if it somehow could, there is more lead in the first foot of top soil than in the PV panel if it is within 100 miles of a highway or flight corridor. If you were to crush it up and blend the solar panel into the soil, it would dilute the heavy metals already present.

You could in principle pollute the ground a little with CdTe solar panels if you went along, cracked them all, and left the non-functioning panels in the rain for years, but CdTe is only used by a small subset of US manufacturers who are especially passionate about using their local market protections to create an inferior product for more money that cannot scale just so it can pollute a small amount rather than a negligible amount. Even then you'd find it difficult to match the amount of heavy metals dispensed by the tractors and other ICE machinery due to contamination in the fuel.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

thank you. I was always sort of skeptical about it as panels always seemed pretty clean.