this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2026
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Climate

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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:

Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.

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France temporarily shuts down three nuclear reactors over heatwave (www.france24.com)
submitted 3 days ago by supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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[–] faintwhenfree@lemmus.org 17 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Solar is heat sensitive? I mean yes it operates at sub optimal conditions, but it still operates also during summer solar energy per m2 is higher due to more optimal earth tilt than during winter months.

So solar panel operating at 15% of 100W absorbed produces 15W in summer. Same panel in winter operating at 20% capacity of 80W in winter makes 16W. Yes summer is lower output, but by not that much. And if it's not heatwave conditions it's even better.

Anyway back to the main point, there solar panels operating at 48 degrees right now that I just visited this month.

[–] Chaf@slrpnk.net 15 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Completely agree, saying that solar is heat sensitive when talking about not being able to power ACs is pretty far out there.

Adding to what you said, ambient temperature only has a slight impact on solar's efficiency. Solar's efficiency usually mainly goes down due to self-heating which is due to higher irradiance. So in some sense they are less efficient because they generate more power.

However your example numbers are way off, solar panels generate much more peak power during summer than during winter, they aren't close to being similar (depending on lattitude, but I guess that's a given when talking about "summer" and "winter").

Image ^[Source]

And the other part that should not be overlooked is that there tends to be some correlation between hot weather and long sunshine, which can also be seen in the plot. So not only is peak power of solar higher during the time when heatwaves are more likely, they also generate power longer.

[–] massive_bereavement@fedia.io 1 points 2 days ago

So if I put panels at home they won't let me hanging if heat outside goes up, cool.