this post was submitted on 01 Apr 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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What is the cheapest way to beat climate change? | Simon Clark (www.youtube.com)
submitted 8 months ago by ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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[–] oo1@kbin.social 4 points 8 months ago

The covid impact is an interesting example of demand reduction.

In my country the imact of petrol in road and air travel still being below pandemic levels in 2022 (latest data) is about 75TWh less fuel demand. This is almost as big as the output of all wind, solar hydro power gen in the country in energy terms (85 TWh) in 2022, and we've been investig fairly heavily for 2-3 decades now.

For cost effective . ..
Drive less, drive (travel) more efficiently, live closer to the things you need.
Heat less, heat more efficiently. (I live in a cold country so cooling is not something i know much about - apart from it being a natural fit for distributed solar PV).
. . . probably also breed less on a global scale for the long term.

I think the pandemic proves that people can travel less if forced too, they just don't want to, hence the bounce back we've been seeing.
But some structural improvements such as work from home for many office workers have locked in some benefits.

Some of the other solutions have complex feedbacks and infrastructure dependencies though. I don't like utility scale PV as it competes with farmland or other land use like forests / swamps.
EVs and electrification of heat will ulimately double or triple the demand on our national electricity grid - i just can't see renewable elec gen growing to that level even on a 30 year horizon .

We tend to do the easy and cheap projects first, so the next 300% is likely to be more than 3x as hard as the 100% so far. The exponential growth of the last few decades will plateau into an S-curve eventually. I think it already has for PV gen - which despite what this dude said in the videos, seems to need subsidy to drive uptake.
Maybe, unless we re-think hydro strategy