this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2025
11 points (86.7% liked)

Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.

6337 readers
1341 users here now

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:

Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
silence7@slrpnk.net
11
With respect to nuclear energy, in what ways will it help alleviate the climate crisis and where will it not? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 3 days ago by SpiceDealer@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/climate@slrpnk.net
17 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Nuclear always comes up when discussing the energy transition but renewables seem to be a much more popular consideration. Can nuclear energy help us towards a greener future or is it a long dead dream?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] SpiceDealer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

...so of you want to keep burning fossil fuels, its great for delay/distraction.

Far from it. I believe that fossil fuels should go the way of the dodo. It's unfortunate that nuclear is depicted as some sort of "Grim Reaper" energy because of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. I find it strange that same fear and paranoia surrounding nuclear isn't also applied to fossil fuels and petrochemicals. Correct if I'm wrong but it seems that Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon did far more damage than Chernobyl ever could.

[–] sonori@beehaw.org 2 points 3 days ago

Chernobyl and the Exxon Valdez are pretty comparable in scale and scope the environment, though Chernobyl certainly had a lot more human casualties.

That being said I’m not sure public opinion actually has had that much of an impact. If they wanted to, the same companies who keep building new oil pipelines no matter how many protesters need to be beaten into submission by cops could absolutely have pushed through adding on some more reactors to existing plants. The problem is that while profitable, nuclear is not as profitable as heavily government subsidized oil and gas much less solar, and so no one but some of the public really wants to put a lot of money into it.