this post was submitted on 04 Dec 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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[–] sonori@beehaw.org 2 points 11 months ago

The US national average grid loss is about 5%, which I figured would often be more than made up for by a lack of shadeing at larger installations. While grid losses are likely to increase as we move to renewables, that’s down to the fact that prime solar and wind spots tend to be much farther away from major north American cities than the suburban power plants that feed them currently. Given the density of said cities, rooftop solar just takes to much space to provide the necessary power for a taller building.

While you can find some home scale ones with sun tracking, given the weight and foundation requirements they almost always need to be built on the ground, and do cost even more. You also have the aesthetic constraint, as while panels flat against the roof only annoy the most Nimby of Nimbys, large person sized poles like this are harder to hide, even if i think they look neat crystal flowers.

https://www.solarreviews.com/content/images/blog/post/focus_images/41_Dual-Axis-Solar-Tracker-2-970.jpg

Finally, tracking panels do have higher routine maintenance requirements, as there are now parfs that can move, wear, and jam. It doesn’t happen often, so one technician can dozens of square miles by themselves, but it takes a lot more time when you need to schedule around individual homeowners and a wide array of different types of install as compared to see a notification on the monitoring software when you get into work, hop in truck with a set of standerd replacement parts, go to panel and fix.