this post was submitted on 31 May 2024
49 points (96.2% liked)

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

5298 readers
459 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
silence7@slrpnk.net
49
Georgia governor calls for even more nuclear power despite budget woes (grist.org)
submitted 5 months ago by jeffw@lemmy.world to c/climate@slrpnk.net
31 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world -3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Wind and solar are great, but they cannot provide consistent 24 hours base load production. Even with massive battery farms, they cannot replace bas load consistently.

That's where nuclear needs to be, replacing the base load production currently being handled via coal and natural gas.

[–] JGcEowt4YXuUtkBUGHoN@slrpnk.net 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

The US at least already has enough nuclear to handle base loads when solar and wind are unavailable. Nukes in some contexts are needed, but I believe we have 30% or so nukes in the US. Diverting resources to new nukes is a waste when we could be making carbon fuels unprofitable soon by investing in solar and wind.

[–] HelixDab2@lemm.ee 1 points 5 months ago

But are they in the right places? There's always loss in power transmission, so you can't use reactors that are in, say, Illinois, to make up for grid deficits in Alabama (or, not directly). And Texas, being a special snowflake, isn't tied into the national grid, so they always need their own systems.