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As Europe Sweats, Some Politicians Talk of Air-Conditioning, Not Climate Action (www.nytimes.com)
submitted 6 days ago by silence7@slrpnk.net to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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Heat-related deaths and disruptions to daily life are forcing politicians to reckon, in different ways, with a rapidly warming planet.

Unfortunately, adaptation on its on isn't doable. It takes ending the use of fossil fuels, which are the main cause of the warming, to make adaptation affordable.

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[-] syklemil@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 6 days ago

That's how geothermal heat pumps work. It is possible to have geothermal heat pumps that only extract heat, but then you need much deeper wells.

Last place I lived replaced our oil furnaces with geothermal heat pumps back when oil furnaces were banned back in 2020, but the in-apartment bit was old radiators, which aren't suitable for absorbing heat, so we had to get some energy wells that were a few hundred meters deep.

… and still swelter in summer :|

[-] boonhet@sopuli.xyz 2 points 6 days ago

I've been looking into it, but the wells alone will cost me ~10-20k EUR to have someone come and do them. 7k for the pump, minimum 2k for the pump to be fitted and probably a bunch of work on the current central heating system which is old and fully reliant on gravity, no circulation pump or anything. Probably 30k all in and get 7k rebate from government if lucky, but I have to apply for that ahead of time and I don't even have the 30k yet to start planning lol.

They do geothermal heat pumps with horizontal collectors too, but my yard isn't big enough compared to the house. Soviet era stuff, you got allocated a tiny plot and you were happy about it because at least you got to build a house. Grandparents decided to build a fairly big house on this particular small plot. And the horizontal version wouldn't really store any heat for the winter.

[-] Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 1 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Not really the same thing, they are heat pumps rather than thermal batteries. Still cool stuff though. They don't have to be deep to only supply heat either, but they do need to be deep if you want to skip the heat pump part of it.

this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2026
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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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