this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2023
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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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Air-Conditioning Use Will Surge in a Warming World, U.N. Warns | By 2050, electricity use for cooling could double, driving up the greenhouse gas emissions that cause warming. (www.nytimes.com)
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[–] FinishingDutch@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago

Geothermal solutions are used in The Netherlands, but solar panels are way more popular in general. A quarter of all homes here have a solar panel installation, but only around 10 percent have heat pumps/geothermal installations from what I've read. The average price for a 12 panel home solar installation is around 8.000 euros, whereas the average price of a full geothermal installation runs you around 28.000.

Now, both are promoted as alternative ways of heating your house, since the country's moving away from natural gas for that purpose. But solar's getting cheaper by the day, especially now that demand has slowed. Investing in cheap solar is preferable to geothermal from that perspective.

As for cooling, geothermal does quite well at that from what I've read. Supposedly it's better at dehumidifying, and it's a heating as well as cooling solution, compared to just cooling on older AC's. Thing is, modern air conditioners do that as well - our home installation can be used for heating in the winter as well. I can only tell you from experience that heating and cooling with our AC units works excellent. From what I've read, geothermal users have high satisfaction rates as well.

I'm no expert on things like the water table, so I honestly couldn't tell you how / what / why it would or wouldn't work.