this post was submitted on 07 Apr 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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[–] Riftinducer@aussie.zone 1 points 7 months ago

Nuclear doesn't really solve the problem. Yes the energy generation is carbon neutral, the material still has to be produced, refined and transported, which is also quite energy expensive, not to mention the messy matter of material disposal. Further, nuclear does put out a lot of energy, but the ability to output an entire countries energy requirements from 3 plants makes energy security worse, because you have fewer fallbacks in the case of power grid malfunction (CSIRO published a nuclear feasibility study for Australia recently which highlighted this as a major issue with nuclear power). Even if all that works out, it still takes ages to build a nuclear plant, by which point you could have filled the grid with renewable energy and storage and saved a lot of time and money while also meeting energy requirements and reducing cadbon output.