this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2024
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Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.

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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:

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 5 months ago (4 children)

How about we wait until the science is actually in before kneejerking around? We have had the science equivalent of a shower thought, actual work and analysis needs to be done before jumping to conclusions.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 5 months ago (1 children)

How about we wait until the science is actually in before sending hundreds and thousands of satellites into LEO?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

That's an interesting idea to consider (if I understand you correctly in that you are stating that there should be a central research authority that regulates what companies are allowed to do). Though, I wonder if it's still better to sue for damages after the fact and create regulations to cover the oversight. There's also the issue of data — you can't exactly study an issue before it exists. If you are instead inferring that a company should conduct this sort of safety research themselves, it creates a sort of prisoner's dilemma: companies wouldn't be to keen on sharing their research with others, and if they are forced to, a company wouldn't want to be the one to waste the money on it for others to profit off of.

I'd also like to note that this sort of regulation has no business being the decision of a single country, but, instead, it should be the decision of a global government, as it is an issue that affects the whole planet. How such a global government should be structured, though, I am not yet certain. The UN doesn't exactly cut it.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

NOAA is doing this science and is alarmed, this isn't just some shower thought

Using an extraordinarily sensitive instrument custom-built at NOAA in Boulder, Colorado, and mounted in the nose of a NASA WB-57 research aircraft**, scientists found aluminum and exotic metals embedded in about 10 percent of sulfuric acid particles, which comprise the large majority of particles in the stratosphere. They were also able to match the ratio of rare elements they measured to special alloys used in rockets and satellites, confirming their source as metal vaporized from spacecraft reentering Earth’s atmosphere.

source

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

There will be a lot of work to understand the implications of these novel metals in the stratosphere,” Murphy said

I don't see anything in that article about them being "alarmed".

So far all the scientists appear to be saying "heads up, we need to investigate this further", not "stop launching, this is bad". We should listen to the scientists.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago

if you read the linked pnas article at https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2313374120 while remaining scientifically dispassionate I very much get the impression they are trying to warn us about the trajectory we are currently on.

You are correct though, the article doesn't say that they are alarmed I have inferred that from following the subject in general.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

Let's fire some shit in the atmosphere first and then let scientists figure it out when it's too late anyway. Absolute boomer shit

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

Urm i think the rocket needs to wait instead of us