this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2024
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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.

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Europe’s Heat Pumps Put America’s to Shame | If switching one home to a heat pump improves energy efficiency, why not whole cities? (www.theatlantic.com)
submitted 4 weeks ago by silence7@slrpnk.net to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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[–] megabat@lemm.ee 3 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

I've been looking into getting a heat pump in the northern US and for heating it doesn't seem to be worth it quite yet. The problem where I'm at is that it gets very cold and natural gas is pretty cheap but electricity is expensive. I hope this changes soon. It would be a no brainer if I were replacing a resistive heater though.

[–] Nollij@sopuli.xyz 2 points 4 weeks ago

Not to discount your experience, but heat pumps are remarkably efficient. It would actually use less gas to convert it to electricity at an industrial scale, and then use that to locally power (recent) heat pumps, than it would be to burn the gas inside your home for all of its heat.

It sounds like your area has some politics in play that are either subsidizing gas or surcharging electric. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does put a thumb on the scale.