this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2024
22 points (76.2% liked)

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

5212 readers
401 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 1 year ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
22
Is nuclear energy the answer? Probably not (www.theclimatebrink.com)
submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
4 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

The author is vastly underestimating the problem caused by intermittency. He just slap $600 of batteries and consider it not intermittent anymore.

It's way more complicated than that.

First is the batteries, how much batteries? Enough to cover the night, one cloudy day, two ?

Then what do you do about winter ? Solar is producing 2-3 times more in summer than in winter, however we use generally not electricity in winter. So do we oversized the solar installation so it still producing enough for winter or do we plan backups ? What kind of backups? We have hydroelectricity and wood, but again if we need to build more wood burning power station it has a cost. Same thing with oversizing the solar installation.

I'm not saying that against renewables energy, I definitely the way to go.

However saying that a kWh of solar/wind is xxx cheaper is misleading.

Yes it's true that producing a kWh of renewable energy is cheap, however producing a kWh of renewable energy when we need it is way more expensive and it needs to be taken into consideration!