this post was submitted on 19 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] 76 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

Contrary to most of the opinions in this thread, I think this (and the van gogh incident) is a great and appropriate protest.

It causes a knee-jerk reaction to be mad that they are harming a precious piece of history and culture, which is a perfect juxtaposition to how the climate change harms our precious natural resources and will harm ourselves, and

It achieves this without actually causing permanent damage to the subject artifact, and

It is incendiary enough to remain in our public consciousness long enough for it to affect the discourse.

I only wish there was a more direct way to protest the people most responsible for the worst effects (oil executives, politicians, etc.), but the truth is that the "average middle-class Westerner" (most of the people who have access to enjoy these particular cultural relics) is globally "one of the worst offenders". While I firmly believe that individuals have less power to enact change than corporations and policymakers, this protest does achieve the goal of causing reflection within people who have the power to make changes.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 6 months ago

I'll disagree. I think these actions only entrench the decided.

As in: if you are of your opinion that damaging artifacts is appropriate, given the protest cause, then you're already "sold".

If you feel that these actions are inappropriate, then you have only gotten further away from these actors, and, potentially their message.

I mean that I'm not sure how many undecided or uninformed folks are impressed, convinced or engaged by these destructive protests.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago (1 children)

It gets the exact opposite effect. Yes they get attention alright. But the wrong attention.

People don't think "oh wow yeah stop oil!" They think "wow these stop oil guys are absolute idiots, I don't want to be associated with them"

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

That's the point though. They've done other protest work "the proper way" and nobody knows about it because it doesn't get reported on. They want the message "just stop oil" to be in the news, so they do what gets them in the news.

If they go for the "right" attention, they're barely reported on by two local outlets. If they go for public outcry, they're global news in hours. Their goal isn't to get you to support their organization. It's to keep you talking about and thinking about and caring about climate change.