this post was submitted on 02 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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New US climate rules for pollution cuts ‘probably terminal’ for coal-fired plants | Experts say only ‘handful of plants’ will likely survive, and only Trump and lawsuits could save them (www.theguardian.com)
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[–] krashmo@lemmy.world -1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Half, which you just admitted is a projection of what will happen in the future and not something that's already happened, is not most. Saying most coal plants have already been taken out of service is demonstrably untrue. I'm not sure what is confusing about that statement. If anything, presenting a future projection as if it has already come to pass is the confusing bit in this conversation.

[–] spidermanchild@sh.itjust.works 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I didn't "admit" anything, I just wanted to provide context that broadly substantiates the fact that coal is in a free fall and already produced less than half of the electric energy it did at its peak in 2011. You can try to be pedantic about the count of plant closures being the one true metric, but what matters is production, which in fact is already more than halved as of over a year ago as we know. Plants make money from capacity markets even if they don't run, which allows them to limp along a bit before actually closing entirely, so that doesn't really tell the story. So yes, the "bulk" of coal production is already gone as of over a year ago. When you use such strong language like "that's not even close to true" that implies the opposite is true, which it obviously isn't. You're welcome to add context and clarify, add sources etc, but your statement struck me as misleading and you didn't back it up at all.

[–] krashmo@lemmy.world 1 points 6 months ago

The original statement I responded to was that the bulk of coal plants are already shut down. At face value that should mean that very few coal plants are still in operation. That is far from accurate as we've established multiple times now. Call that correction pedantic if you want to but I don't think the difference between either a dozen or over a hundred coal plants remaining in operation is insignificant. Personally I find the fact that you're still dancing around the definitions of "bulk" and "most" instead of just correcting the description to "some" or even "many" to be the epitome of pedantry but to each his own.