this post was submitted on 11 Mar 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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[–] MrMakabar@slrpnk.net 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Yes, you can get it on the right site under exports as an .csv file

[–] tunetardis@lemmy.ca 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Here's what it looks like after 7 (top) and 30 (bottom) days of averaging to give an idea of how much more reliability you can buy with a week or month of grid storage.

Of course, there is also variability on the demand side you need to match. Hmm…

[–] tunetardis@lemmy.ca 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

So, a few thoughts on this. If you consider the minimum on any of these graphs as a kind of base load capacity, you would need to build enough solar and wind to cover what's demanded by the population. The fluctuating part above that line is excess which maybe might find some sort of opportunistic use but will more likely be discarded. I guess the industry term for this is curtailment.

The more you invest in storage, the less you will need to curtail. But given that even with a month worth of storage (which is a colossal amount if you crunch the numbers), there will be some curtailment, my takeaway from this is that there is room for synthetic fuel production like green hydrogen that would kick in once you've saturated all your batteries, pumped hydro, etc. I'd been wondering about this. There is energy loss (relative to say batteries) in making fuel out of electricity, but the energy in this case is essentially free, so why not give it a go? And we are really good at stockpiling fuels. The amount of energy stored that way around the world is orders of magnitude beyond everything else combined.

[–] MrMakabar@slrpnk.net 1 points 8 months ago

The problem with that is that electrolysers are currently very expensive and they are needed for all sorts of e-fuels.

However electric boilers are cheap and storing a lot of heat is also very cheap and easy. The only thing you need is a giant tank and some insulation around it. There are a lot of under ground caverns from mining to work with. Then you can use the heat for district heating or for industry.