this post was submitted on 07 Jun 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.

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A renewable energy transition that doesn’t harm nature? It’s not just possible, it’s essential (theconversation.com)
submitted 5 months ago by silence7@slrpnk.net to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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[–] silence7@slrpnk.net 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Solar pays for itself within the first 2-3 years, and lasts for decades. Batteries are cheap enough to do overnight storage at utility scale so that wind + solar + batteries do overnight power more cheaply than nuclear.

This leaves nuclear only able to maybe compete with longer-duration storage. Which is why nobody is building much.

[–] RealFknNito@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago

If they last for decades, why is there so much ewaste for specifically photovolatic cells? Theoretically lasting decades, sure, but they seem to have a high chance of breaking.

I don't think there's a single real world instance of a city having batteries being able to sustain the load for the night without any added generation. That would be newsworthy and a massive win for renewables. They might get there eventually with sodium based batteries but that has yet to be seen.

If solar panels were discarded less and battery arrays could be cheaply made so that nuclear and coal weren't nessesary, I'd agree with you, but I haven't seen either of those things. They're "likely in the future" but by that time, we could make another nuclear power plant.

And all this without even considering fusion, which in my humble opinion, would replace renewables.