this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2024
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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.

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Indoor farms are remaking the produce market — at a cost to the planet (wapo.st)
submitted 7 months ago by silence7@slrpnk.net to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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Energy use in the industry varies widely depending on greenhouse size and what crops are being grown. A study of 12 indoor farms by the nonprofit Resource Innovation Institute found that five of them used as much energy, per square foot, as a hospital. One vertical farm, an outlier, was guzzling as much energy as a data center.

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[–] frezik@midwest.social 2 points 7 months ago

A vertical farm wouldn't be able to power itself with solar on its own roof. You can't convert from light to electricity to light again and end up with more light. Possibly it could if you're converting to specific wavelengths used by the plants, but given the sheer number of layers in even a single floor vertical farm, it's still unlikely to be able to power itself.

So if solar and wind is the answer, you have to have fields full of those two. But then, why not just grow food in those fields? There might be specific situations that have a good answer to that, like the land isn't suitable for agriculture, but otherwise, we have to look for solutions other than solar and wind.

Alternatively, if water use is a big deal, then we can seek ways to reduce water use in traditional agriculture.