this post was submitted on 09 Jul 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.

Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:

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Can we air condition our way out of extreme heat? part 1: a primer on air conditioning (www.theclimatebrink.com)
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[–] toaster@slrpnk.net 13 points 4 months ago

This was a great, succinct article. Here are a few key points that I noticed:

The important result here is that the efficiency of your air conditioner decreases as ∆T increases — e.g., as the outside temperature goes up.

the work required to keep your house at a fixed temperature Tc increases with the square of the temperature difference between inside and outside temperature, ΔT².

Let’s use the same numbers from the previous example: you want to keep your house at 75F. If climate change has increased the outside temperature from 96F to 100F, the energy your air conditioner consumes increases by (100-75)2/(96-75)2 = 252/212 — this is an increase in energy consumption of 42%!

Averaged over an entire day, the increase will be less than this because ∆T is smaller for much of the day (e.g., at night) But the result is robust: climate change is driving exponentially increasing energy demand for cooling.

People with financial means, who work in air-conditioned offices and live in climate-controlled homes, can handle rising temperatures by simply paying for more electricity.

However, a significant portion of the global population lives the hot life. These people live in homes without air conditioning, work outdoors or in warehouses or kitchens with no climate control.