this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2023
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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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‘You can walk around in a T-shirt’: how Norway brought heat pumps in from the cold | Device installed in two-thirds of households of country (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (2 children)

There's also different kinds of heat pumps. The most expensive version is vertical bore, but it also does better in colder climates. The term "heat pump" is kind of confusing to the average person, because it represents several different ways/layouts to accomplish the same goal.

Additionally, even if it can't keep up in extreme cold weather (hypothetically), imagine if you have a system that can heat your home to 15C, and then you have supplemental heating on top of that. You'd still save money and energy over having traditional heating methods.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

It's all basically the same type of systems, it just varies as where they pull/send to. The vertical bore style is just straight down instead of loops in your backyard for the installations where there isn't much yard to work with. It takes more specialized equipment because you're drilling rather than just burying lines, hence most of the added costs.

Where I live it drops into the -30 to -40c degree temps and properly installed geothermal systems have no problems with it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

We have a heat pump, and it seems to work just fine down to about -25°C, even though we do not have an inground circuit, just a device that looks like an air conditioning heat exchanger (i.e. a cube sitting beside the house).