this post was submitted on 09 Oct 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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Booming power demand is slowing climate progress for US utilities | Sierra Club analysis finds that U.S. utilities are planning a huge expansion of fossil gas-plants (www.canarymedia.com)
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[–] Track_Shovel 3 points 1 month ago

My dear Froggie (and silence!) I don't know who is downvoting you, but they can fuck right off.

You make great points. I particularly like this one:

Solar and wind have simply become so cheap, and nuclear so difficult due to the required generational knowledge being lost, that by the time you trained up enough people to relearn what the old builders knew, and built a sizeable amount of them, it’s simply too likely that we could’ve built double the generational capacity with solar in the same amount of time with far less cost.

I'm not a staunch nuclear advocate by any stretch. I want green power however we can get it, provided the environmental costs aren't abhorrent. You're very right about the brain drain part, too.

There's mining involved in any energy transition. One part that I like about the Nuclear option, however, is that the deposits are generally high grade (v.s. copper, and rare earth) which result in less surface disturbances. For instance, Cameco (northern Saskatchewan) has uranium ore deposits that are ~20% w/w. Their deposits are so rich, that they have to dilute them with inert waste rock before running through the mill. These deposits are just sitting there, ready to be used for green energy, but as you point out, there's too many hurdles.

Solar and wind seem like they're really picking up speed, and that is wonderful. I know there's still some issues to iron out about excess generation/power storage/power fluctuation. I could see small batch reactors helping with that potentially. I don't think an energy transition is going to be a one size fits all thing. It's going to be based regionally, on what makes sense.