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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Please Do Not Let Elon Musk Destroy the Ozone Layer (www.splinter.com)
submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [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.