this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2024
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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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Opinion | Tripling the World’s Nuclear Energy Capacity Is a Fantasy (www.nytimes.com)
submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Large scale nuclear power plants take hundreds of millions or billions of dollars of investment and loads of time to build. It's more likely that any nuclear revolution is going to come in the form of smaller scale micro reactors.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Smaller reactors that can be placed at sites of existing fossile fuel plants (that already have the necessary grid connection) do indeed sound like an interesting option. However the fast advances in grid battery storage at those same sites as well as potential novel geothermal drilling methods aiming to do the same are more likely to arrive in the short to medium term than those proposed small nuclear reactors.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

The average construction time for a plant in the west is what… 17 years? Powering even our current needs would deplete all known resources (including those in the ground) within less than a decade. Nuclear is a pipe dream and the mining for it is dirty and leaves the earth polluted and the people and ecosystems nearby suffering long after mining is completed. SRSLY Wrong just did a great episode on clean energy that has a good part about nuclear energy also, I recommend everyone to listen to it, and if possible read the book by the guest also.