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)
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[–] perestroika@slrpnk.net 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

On individual scale, precisely that - a split type AC with one half indoors (or in a water tank) and the other half in an outdoor environement (air, water or ground).

If you're extracting heat from the environment, the machine lets the working fluid evaporate into the outdoor heat exchanger and compresses it back into the indoor heat exchanger. If you're cooling your premises - reverse that.

However, on a city scale, it's like "you've got a lot of sewage at 30 C" -> "your heat pump is a large building" -> "your sewage outflow is now at 10 C, but your underground heat reservoir gets charged to 140 C (stays liquid because of water column pressure), and you spend much less energy pumping the heat than you would spend heating the water directly".