this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2023
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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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‘World’s largest offshore wind farm’ produces power for the first time (www.euronews.com)
submitted 1 year ago by bernieecclestoned@sh.itjust.works to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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[–] spacedout@lemmy.ml -5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

Impressive scale, with mills the size of Rockefeller center and the farm's extent equal to London. Still only 5 percent of UK's energy consumption when they are operating at max capacity. Two things come to mind:

  • What was the cost in terms of climate gases to build and install these, and what are the plans for their eventual decommissioning?
  • What are the impacts on atmospheric flows, especially if this was scaled up to cover a larger part of UK consumption, and joined by similar installations from other countries?
[–] bernieecclestoned@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] spacedout@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's very comprehensive, 100s of pages of technical and impact reporting. I'm not trying to undermine the project, was just curious and hoping for a ELI5 kind of thing.

[–] bernieecclestoned@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 year ago

When you divide the total emissions associated with a wind turbine by the amount of electricity it will produce in its lifetime, it works out at about 6 g of carbon dioxide for every kilowatt-hour (kWh) of electricity.1

By comparison, power generation based on fossil fuels involves burning more coal, oil or gas for every kWh of electricity, on top of the one-off carbon emissions from construction and decommissioning. For coal, this adds up to approximately 900 g per kWh.

https://orsted.com/en/insights/the-fact-file/what-is-the-carbon-footprint-of-offshore-wind

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