this post was submitted on 04 Dec 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.

Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:

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California regulators cut incentives for rooftop solar even further (www.canarymedia.com)
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[–] jadero@slrpnk.net 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Natural gas is not available to us.

Our residential heat (900 ft² mobile home) is a 20-year old pellet stove with occasional use of a space heater in the opposite end of the building. There is no evidence that it's on the way out, but it is 20 years old. We use 150-180 40lb bags of pellets to the tune of $1300-$1500 per year, plus the power used by the stove.

My shop (250 ft²) gets enough heat from occasional use of an external wood-fired rocket stove with heat exchanger for 3-season use. On colder days, I add in the overhead 750/1500 watt electric radiant heater so that I don't have to wait 3 hours for the shop to come up to temperature, but I try to not use the shop when it's colder than about -10C.

My analysis suggests that I can save at least $1000/year on pellets and eliminate the use of space heaters and rocket stove while also making it much easier to heat the shop when I need it. $1000/year (really, 6-7 months) goes a long way to making up the difference between current electrical use and expected electrical use.

And even if I've miscalculated, we can afford to pay a bit more to reduce wood use and resistive heating. One thing I've learned is that the best pellet stoves still put out more particulates than I'd like, and the rocket stove is worse. (Although the rocket stove is far better than the a campfire and people go through a lot more wood for their campfire than I use in the rocket stove.)

[–] OminousOrange@lemmy.ca 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Ah, then yes, you'd benefit quite a bit from a heat pump. I'd keep the existing systems as backup for those extra cold days, but otherwise it sounds like a great upgrade, and you get the bonus of cooling in the summer.

[–] jadero@slrpnk.net 1 points 11 months ago

Keeping the other systems operational for the coldest days and backup is the plan.

We've done fine with just a smallish room AC, but our heat tolerance is going down as we age, so having a bit more cooling would be nice.