this post was submitted on 21 Aug 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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Many nations have embraced burning wood pellets to produce electricity — under the assumption that it is carbon neutral. But research shows this approach can boost greenhouse-gas emissions (www.nature.com)
submitted 3 weeks ago by silence7@slrpnk.net to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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[–] kalkulat@lemmy.world 7 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Fire that consumes hydrocarbon fuels and oxygen liberates CO2. So yeah. Gasoline, diesel, natural gas, wood chips, all hydrocarbon fuels. NO SUCH THING as 'green' wood burning.

[–] cows_are_underrated 4 points 3 weeks ago

If you continue reading they explain what's meant. They emit CO2 when burned that gets absorbed later. According to the study they cited it takes about 44+ years to re absorb the emitted CO2. The critics actually is, that it I creases CO2 emittion in the short term, which is kinda bad if were already overshooting the 1.5°C agreement.

[–] pupbiru@aussie.zone 3 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

you’re missing the point a little though… if you plant a tree, let it grow, burn it, it has consumed the co2 that you release from burning it to grown the tree

so if you’re burning a tree, planting a new one, and letting it grow to the maturity of the original tree, that’s… similar-ish

the devil is in the detail because transport and a bunch of other concerns come into play, but it’s not as simple as just burning things because there’s a carbon capture step too

[–] kalkulat@lemmy.world 3 points 2 weeks ago

Totally agreed ... IF you plant a tree, and let it grow, then pellitize and transport it in a green way, then burning it won't release more hydrocarbons than it accumlated.

[–] silence7@slrpnk.net 1 points 3 weeks ago

As I said downthread:

The key thing about this is that when you build a power plant which burns wood pellets, it takes a whole lot of mature forest, and converts it into CO2; you go from a whole bunch of mature trees to a mix of trees of varying ages. So something like half the carbon in the forest is in the atmosphere for as long as the power plant is in operation.