this post was submitted on 05 Aug 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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Utilities are trying hydrogen-blended fuels. There are a lot of ‘unknowns.’ (floodlightnews.org)
submitted 3 months ago by jeffw@lemmy.world to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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[–] Wahots@pawb.social 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

I don't know too much about this area, but I can't help but feel blue hydrogen research is too little, too late.

We should be focused on electrifying homes, offices, and factories ASAP with hydrogen research money. Stuff like aluminum smelting furnaces being powered by green hydrogen could be a great area of research, as could global shipping, which will probably need to run off eFuels, hydrogen, or nuclear going forward. This money doesn't appear to be going towards that.

I just don't see homes as a viable branch of hydrogen research. Old, leaky gas lines, stuff not up to code, and a suspiciously close link to existing gas and oil companies makes this feel like it won't hold water as a line of research when we have perfectly safe, carbon-free alternatives (plus, no risk of explosions or carbon monoxide from blended gasses)

[–] RvTV95XBeo@sh.itjust.works 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I've studied this (professionally) quite a bit, and I can confidently say you're generally right.

Blends up to 20% hydrogen or so are pretty straightforward and can be done relatively easily without having to spend hundreds of billions of dollars upgrading downstream equipment, but that's only, optimistically, a 20% reduction in emissions. To get past that you need to replace most downstream burners, which will be very slow and cost a fortune. Better off going electric for homes

[–] Tiresia@slrpnk.net 2 points 3 months ago

Sounds like an set-up to ensure long-term dependency on natural gas mining, then.

Sorry, we built our infrastructure assuming 80% natural gas, so we just have to mine more natural gas to prevent people from losing their ability to cook food. You wouldn't want poor families to go hungry, would you?