this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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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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[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

This is tricky, but I think it's not all bad. At least if you can develop a reliable hydrogen infrastructure, it opens up the opportunity to convert it to green hydrogen later. Although green hydrogen sites may have different requirements that make it hard to retrofit. I don't know.

I also don't know that the technology is ready to make use of it on the demand side.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

The problem is that separating hydrogen from water requires more energy than separating hydrogen from hydrocarbons. So if you allow the same subsidy for producing hydrogen from methane as you do for producing it from water, you'll end up with a newly entrenched chunk of the fossil fuels industry which is very difficult to get rid of.