this post was submitted on 15 Nov 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.

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

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Nuclear Power Was Once Shunned at Climate Talks. Now, It’s a Rising Star. | Growing worldwide energy demand and other factors have shifted the calculus, but hurdles still lie ahead. (www.nytimes.com)
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[–] Rhaedas@fedia.io 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Aren't there limits on keeping old ones running? And so many of them are old already. I agree that this is something that should have been planned and begun a while ago.

[–] sonori@beehaw.org 2 points 1 month ago

For the most part to my knowledge it’s the same as maintaining any large, complex piece of infrastructure. As it gets older spare parts get harder to find and have to be replaced with different similar parts requiring new engineering analysis, more and more big components like pipes and tanks get to the point where they need to be wholly replaced, etc…

Design lifespan is the point the designers expected a lot of annoying to replace things to wear out on paper for the cost of maintenance to rise, but now in the present we can inspect things to see how they actually did in practice.

This means that operations gets more expensive and you need to shut down for major work every now and then, but compared to the ever increasing cost of building an entire new plant just replacing the parts that have worn out in order to squeeze an extra fifteen or twenty years is probably going to be more cost effective to a point.

We just need them to hold in long enough for us to get enough renewables and storage capacity on the grid to replace all the fossil sources, at which point we can keep building renewables and replace the most most expensive to maintain nuclear and most fish limiting dams and the like.