this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
47 points (98.0% liked)

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

5239 readers
498 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
[email protected]
47
Heat pumps were supposed to transform the world. But it’s not going as planned. | Heat pump sales, critical to the transition to clean energy, have slowed in the U.S. and stalled in Europe. (wapo.st)
submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
22 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Where I live there's a likely chance for it to get cold enough for the heat pump to stop working. Now they make special ones that can work down to -15F but those are also more expensive.

I'd like geothermal but that is an upfront cost of $10-25 thousand and a several month lead time for installation. Meaning I'm out that money without any chance of it being recouped for quite a long time, it's going to take 10+y for the savings to make it up in the first place and I'm not sure I'll be in the house long enough for that.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago

In practice, I see people in your situation spend their additional budget on insulation and an air-source heat pump, rather than go to geothermal.