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] 18 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Are you just doing the thing where you cast doubt on journal articles because they feel wrong? You don't think humans can affect the natural environment in such a way? This sounds oddly familiar and a bit ironic for this community....

Meteors aren't made out of aluminum like satellites are btw. There will be more reasearch done and we will learn more. But for now, there's a potential issue.

https://phys.org/news/2024-06-satellite-megaconstellations-jeopardize-recovery-ozone.amp

[–] [email protected] -5 points 5 months ago (3 children)

Meteors aren't made out of aluminum

Aluminium is an element, it's going to be present in meteors to the same extent it is on earth

[–] Axxys 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Is that a thing? Meteors content matching Earths?

[–] [email protected] -5 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

Meteors are leftovers of the same primordial stuff that made up earth, so a cross sample of them would largely share the same ratios as earth, minus the volatiles.

Though it looks like the community hive mind has made up its mind on this one

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Meteors are leftovers of the same primordial stuff that made up earth, so a cross sample of them would largely share the same ratios as earth, minus the volatiles.

Logic would dictate that that is likely, though that statement itself isn't scientific. Do you have any sources to back that up? I could see a possibility where, perhaps, certain elements are more likely to coalesce into planetary bodies, and others into meteoroids. It could also depend on the location in the solar system where the formation occurred — the primordial dust cloud that made up the infant solar system, I would wager, would be far from uniform.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

I did some very rough estimates and found that the amount of aluminum entering the Earth's atmosphere each year is probably between 100 and 500 tons, which would be roughly comparable to the amount coming from these LEO comm sats like Starlink.

These are just super ballpark figures, but it's in the same order of magnitude. More research is definitely necessary.

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

That's not the comparison at all, the comparison is what the sattelites are made of (mostly aluminum) and what the meteors are made of (mostly other stuff, like earth).