this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2024
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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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Energy efficiency of active travel (walking, cycling, ebike) compared to an electric car (slrpnk.net)
submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

I get what you are trying to ask, and why, but unfortunately, such a comparison is not so trivial:

Setting aside load (weight) and age differences, various transportation means use gear shifting in order to adapt the power output to the characteristics of the current load (as in "system load" this time). This adds a dimension of dynamism to the comparison, and most vehicles do not automatically and systematically impose an ideal efficiency constraint on the power output.

To illustrate, using a single speed bike requires vastly different power than using a 7 speed bike. And different driving styles will radically change the efficiency of combustion engines.

So, in addition to mapping the efficiency to various speeds, it should be mapped to various use cases (hence why combustion engines have different fuel economy in "urban" and "extra urban" situations).

In the end, the graphic would not be 2D like this one, or 3D like it would be with "time per km" (or mile) vs energy requirement, and per type of vehicle, but there would be several 3D graphics, one per vehicle type, with time per km vs environment vs energy consumption.

TBH I was gonna try and do that, but even with ADHD, I can see this is going to be mad time consuming. So yeah, no, I think I'll pass. Good idea tho. "Someone" should do it. ๐Ÿ˜‡