this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023
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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.

Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:

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[–] tryptaminev@feddit.de 10 points 1 year ago

It is nice that solar is finally in the lead, but it is deeply worrying, that the investions into oil are still at around 400bn $/a.

We need to be net neutral within the remaining emission budget, which is generally projected at 2050. The budget for the 1.5 °C goal at current emissions speed, runs out in 6 years

https://www.mcc-berlin.net/forschung/co2-budget.html

So these oil investments would need to have an ROI greater than 12% to become profitable within the next 6 years. Anyone who is involved in infrastructure and industry knows that to be ludicrous. Realistically these investments are projected with 30-50 years of operations. In order to meet 2050 we need zero oil investments right now

[–] MrMakabar@slrpnk.net 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] PoisonedPrisonPanda@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So many talk about energy generation but nobody discusses that e.g. in central europe electrical energy transport is at its limits and its an issue that more solar and wind is built but poor advancements in the power grid are conducted.

[–] MrMakabar@slrpnk.net 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Last year over 60% of global electricity was produced from fossil fuels. Sending electricity over long distances only starts to matter, when you have an overproduction of clean electricity. For most of the world that is quite simply not the case.

[–] PoisonedPrisonPanda@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I havent looked into the numbers, but how large is the portion of this 60% from europe?

Germany has many occasions where wind turbines were cut off the grid and e.g. in austria its the case that due to separation of high voltage grid and local grid the spike in solar overproduction is endangering the infrastructure.

I can assume that similar issues arise in the rest of the western world as well.

The issue I see is that such problems will limit the pace of the energy transition which is a major path for handling the climate crisis.

Else the 3rd world countries will run into the same troubles as 1st world countries did and we will loose in general time that we are not going to have.

[–] MrMakabar@slrpnk.net 2 points 1 year ago

It is less then 32% fossil fuels for the EU. At the same time the German power grid is pretty much the most reliable in the world. The US grid has had over 8h of power interruptions per cutomer per year. Germany is well below 15 min in the same metric.