this post was submitted on 09 Aug 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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Biomass power station produced four times emissions of UK coal plant, says report (www.theguardian.com)
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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

No its not and it uses shit loads of water that aren't available at all times. Its not good enough to help, we shouldn't decommission the already existing ones (if safe), but focus on stuff that is faster to scale up, like solar and wind (and maybe geothermal).

Oh and modern solar panels don't require rare earths:

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2019/11/28/are-rare-earths-used-in-solar-panels/

https://interestingengineering.com/science/efficient-alloy-based-solar-panels-created-free-of-toxic-metals

I get the feeling that you are seriously illinformed about solar.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

So don't build your nuclear reactors in a place that doesn't have shit tons of water?

Solar and wind can't handle peak consumption without obscene amounts of heavily polluting storage. They should definitely get the majority of the attention and budget, but nuclear is still important and will still be faster to scale up faster in many specific locations. Get as much solar in the subtropics and tropics as possible, get wind in windy locations, get geothermal and tidal where that is viable, but get nuclear in places with plenty of water that are further than 45 degrees/5000 km from the equator in areas with little wind, and for peak consumption in places without hydroelectric or other power that isn't best to keep at the max 24/7, and for quick response to fluctuations in wind and solar in places where other regulators aren't available.

The articles you link are about experimental or niche tech, expensive or inefficient or both. Rare earths are still used in pretty much all solar panels that are actually being built. They're also not the only form of pollution from solar panel manufacturing, transportation, installation, and recycling/disposal.