this post was submitted on 08 Apr 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.

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

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Is nuclear energy the answer? Probably not (www.theclimatebrink.com)
submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 15 points 7 months ago

I think this matter boils down to the following: Nuclear is better than fossil fuels (by a significant margin) but the spin up time and investment is significant, too significant for many. Such little investment has been made in the last 10 or so years that investing now when the world is on the precipice of being able (though clearly, not very willing) to use wholly renewable sources seems like a better investment, even with the various pitfalls of each respective source. Energy storage has come a long way and with significant leaps every few years, it seems that energy storage + renewables is the way forward but it's sad to see the missed nuclear opportunity. Like so many other promising and environmentally friendly(er) ideas, it has unfortunately been passed over when the time was right and will not be utilised sufficiently.