this post was submitted on 22 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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[–] SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone 17 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Electricity isn't that expensive, especially if you have renewables. Stuff and transportation is. The biggest cause for co2 at the top is consumerism.

Remember that, once you have your electronics, the entertainment you get from it is competing against entertainment from physical things, or travel, or something else.

In addition, in winter that electricity is turned into heat, which you need anyway to heat up your home. And heating has always taken much more electricity than video games in my experience.

All things considered, video games are a fairly efficient form of entertainment. You can do everything digitally (cheap), and hardware can be made to be very power efficient (it just isn't because electricity is cheap).

[–] Sylvartas@lemmy.world 4 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

IIRC the thermal efficiency of a PC/console is basically the same as most electric heating implements. I.e an electric radiator or a computer converts something like 80% of the energy it draws into heat. So theoretically, if you're heating a room with electricity, you're not polluting more when using a computer or console in it (apart from the servers/Internet consumption for online stuff)

[–] SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 9 months ago

Computers and electric heaters turn near-100% of the power into heat, as do most other things. Heat is just a waste product, electric heaters work by effectively "wasting" the electricity into heat.