this post was submitted on 28 May 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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A call to replace air conditioners with heat pumps in California (www.canarymedia.com)
submitted 5 months ago by silence7@slrpnk.net to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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[–] qupada@kbin.social 5 points 5 months ago

It is a good question.

Where I live, electricity costs around $0.28/kWh, but generation is typically >85% renewable (predominantly hydroelectric).

My heat pump (4.7 COP when heating) would cost $0.06 to run for every 1kWh of heat it produces, with only 0.03kWh of that electricity coming from fossil fuel sources.

Gas - which I don't have at my house - would have pricing in the neighbourhood of $0.15/kWh. Even at 95% efficiency getting 1kWh of heat from gas would cost $0.16, using 1.05kWh of gas.

35x the fossil fuel usage and 2.5x the price, for the same quantity of heat. Some luck of living in a moderate climate where an air-source heat pump almost never loses efficiency, to be fair.