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We’re over-freezing our food. Turning up the temperature slightly could avoid 17 Mt of CO2
(www.anthropocenemagazine.org)
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:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
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The international standard for freezing food is -18C, about 0F, they are talking about increasing that by three degrees to about 3F or -15c, which would have no impact on likeliness of food poisoning. People should use private jets less as well but this seems like a change that could be made across an industry more easily. This isn't about people turning up their freezers at home but rather commercial food operations which accounts for a much larger portion of energy used.
This is the internet so take this with a grain of salt. I work in a life safety field and the last 50 years of research has been to shift the evaluation of safety from an arbitrary value for safety to a statistical basis - all in the name of efficiency (cost, material, environmental - pick you’re cause, they all have a voice). There is generally no perfectly safe condition, only a poly at which the number of standard deviations from the norm makes failure so unlikely as to be nearly impossible. We have classes of prevention and imposed conditions and there are under the intersection of (failure in prevention)x(exceptional imposed danger) are dead people, or at least loss of property.
Shifting the freezer set point is moving the prevention curve. The number may be small, but it’s still finite. The question the actuaries will ask is if the economic value of 19MT is worth an increase in probability for the sickness or death of X people. I’m merely arguing that the value, to me personally, is not sufficient.