this post was submitted on 15 Jul 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.

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A hydrogen-powered air taxi flew 523 miles emitting only water vapor (www.popsci.com)
submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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"Joby took a pre-production prototype of one of its battery-electric aircraft and outfitted it with a liquid hydrogen fuel tank and fuel system. The modified, hydrogen-powered VTOL was able to complete a 523 mile flight above Marina, California..."

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[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

That's where it comes from presently because we haven't started producing significant amounts of green hydrogen yet. "This tech is useless because we aren't doing it yet!"

Constructing large solar and wind arrays in remote / uninhabitable areas is not free, but the land is "free" because in many cases it's not suitable for any other use. I think a lot of people dreaming of a wind & solar renewable future underestimate the physical area required to capture enough sunlight to power everyone's EVs.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

Scaling mostly reduces economic costs, not environmental ones (latter primarily through better logistics).

I think a lot of people dreaming of a wind & solar renewable future underestimate the physical area required to capture enough sunlight to power everyone's EVs.

Exactly! And we'll need even more if we want to use hydro. That's my point, besides the fact that building cars is extremely wasteful to begin with.