this post was submitted on 28 May 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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A call to replace air conditioners with heat pumps in California (www.canarymedia.com)
submitted 3 months ago by silence7@slrpnk.net to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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[–] huginn@feddit.it 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

AFAIK most American AC units can be retrofitted to be heat pumps pretty easily. You're just making it flow in reverse, after all.

[–] mkwt@lemmy.world 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

In automotive at least, it's pretty common to size the evaporator and condenser coils based on their expected operating temperatures and (therefore) pressures. Usually this means condenser is a lot bigger than evaporator.

If you reverse the flow with the right valves and compressor setup, then the heat exchangers will still be sized wrong for efficiency. I suppose you could design a bidirectional system from the start that trades off for middling efficiency in both modes.

I'm not at all convinced that there are a substantial number of such bidirectional-sized residential systems installed in North America. But it's also possible that the residential folks don't care much about HX efficiency.

[–] huginn@feddit.it 0 points 3 months ago

That makes sense, but also most heat pumps I know of are also AC units - like those mini splits installed in new apartments these days.

Would that not also be a balanced system?

And even if we're talking about lower efficiency it's still more efficient than burning gas in a furnace right?