this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2025
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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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How the little-known ‘dark roof’ lobby may be making US cities hotter (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 2 days ago by FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.cafe to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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[–] DilbertDooley@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

It's just not true.

North America & Europe (temperate/cold climates) Heating dominates. In the U.S., for example, space heating accounts for roughly 2–3× more total energy than cooling on an annual basis, especially in northern and central states. In Europe, cooling demand is tiny in comparison — many countries use almost no air conditioning outside southern regions.

Why heating dominates overall:

  • Large parts of North America and Europe have long winters.
  • Heating often uses high-energy fuels (natural gas, oil, electricity), so the energy content is higher even if cooling is more frequent in some places.
  • Cooling is mostly electric and can be efficient with modern A/C systems, so it consumes less energy per degree of temperature change compared to heating.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-023-00878-3

[–] FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.cafe 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

That’s not disproving what the article said. Heating can dominate while the impacts of white roofs are still beneficial.

For one, the sun is far more active in summer than winter, especially further up north.

[–] DilbertDooley@lemmy.world -3 points 2 days ago

That's just complete bullshit. The sun's activity doesn't have anything to do with what the position of the earth is at any given time.