this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2025
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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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Can we afford to be afraid of nuclear power? (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Sure, but transporting power over very long distances comes with two issues: losses and disruptions.

It's what we do now. Most cities don't have dedicated power plants right next to them, we have national and even multinational grids. If it works for fossil (and nuclear) plants, it works the same for renewables.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Most cities are substantially smaller and grids there can be made more cheap and reliable without elements getting so much in the way.

I agree we should do more to center grids around renewables even if they're far away; but there are some instances where this just isn't practical, and nuclear technology offers a reasonably eco-friendly (as compared to fossil) way out.

Using nuclear power allows the city not to burn 30 million tonnes of coal every year (i.e. the biggest cargo ship on Earth every 5 days), which I would say is a win, given the circumstances.