this post was submitted on 02 Aug 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] 30 points 1 month ago

Good ol sunshine state basically making it illegal to invest in solar. I fucking hope desantis gets exiled.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 month ago (4 children)

I read your comment before clicking on the article, and I thought "how bad could they be?"

These have me in tears.... Lol

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago

They are ugly, but they also tell an important story, which is the decline of coal, and (in some areas) rise of wind and solar.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Love the "gas" label in your second picture. There was no need at all to tilt letters, but I guess it would not keep the theme of "thrown together" if it was straight text.

Also what is with all that background white in between the graphs? Is it electricity demand that didn't get meet by any means? Asking jokingly.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

I honestly can't believe those are real graphs. Looks like Ms paint and that Amiga 500 program had a baby that was dropped on his head

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

You’d think that 100% height graphs (or whatever they’re called) didn’t exist

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Such a shame seeing how we’ve all but abandoned nuclear energy as an option

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (2 children)

That's mostly about it's incredibly high cost

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago
[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Yup! Turns out utilities don't want to spend a multi billion dollar upfront cost, even though they would reap huge rewards, as nuclear, over the whole lifetime of the plant, is very cost-effective. But hey, let's continue to subsidize gas instead!

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It's not as cheap as wind or solar at current upfront costs.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I guess I should have clarified. When you do a cost analysis of per MW generation over the lifetime of the plant, it gets significantly cheaper. Cheaper than solar, or wind. The only issue is the large upfront cost of billions of dollars, like I previously stated. The cost of solar and wind is cheaper up front, but on a large generation scale, is lacking. Nuclear is the only solution right now to the climate. There is no other large scale generation that can sustain demand as clean as nuclear.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I'm talking about the exact same thing. Wind and solar are cheaper by that metric.

Nuclear is still cost-competitive with long-duration storage, so if that doesn't fall in price (which is what has been happening with storage recently) it might make sense to use for 10% or so of overall generation.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

That is inaccurate. You can look up LCOE for all of these and Nuclear is right up there with Gas. Also, you can't have 10% of your generation be nuclear with solar and wind making up the majority. You literally cannot produce that much electricity. Nuclear, being arguably the most efficient source of energy and the largest capacity, it makes sense for nuclear to be in place of our coal and gas plants with solar and wind supplements. But hey, that's just what I studied for a living.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

I did. That was true 20 years ago. It's not now

[–] Zipitydew 2 points 1 month ago

Not here in Illinois thankfully. We've got enough electric from nuclear that we export to other states.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago

I love living in Washington. But I i fear the backlash as Inslee finishes his last term. He's been a great, green governor, but absolutely vilified for it by the right.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Based vermont (but rip nuclear)