this post was submitted on 26 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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Texas’ Extreme Weather Pileups Point to World’s Climate Future | The state is reeling from multiple natural disasters. “Compound events” like these are set to become more common in a a warming world. (www.bloomberg.com)
submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

There was an excellent allegory for this from Tamino many years ago that stuck with me. For those not in the know, he's a statistician who works with climate scientists (amongst other things) like Professor Stefan Rhamstorf

https://tamino.wordpress.com/2016/02/03/how-to-destroy-a-megalopolis/

In fact I did it every day. One large pot of boiling hot water. The idea wasn’t to kill all the ants, or to eradicate their megalopolis in one crushing blow. The idea was simply to make it too costly, in terms of energy and time, for their complex of ant cities to be sustainable.

It worked.

After about two weeks, the ants were gone. Completely. I believe they just couldn’t stay there any more, it was just too difficult with such regular demands on repair. I don’t know whether the megalopolis died out, or they moved to a different location. But any way you look at it, I succeeded in destroying their megalopolis, because amid the continual assault of disasters, they simply weren’t able to keep up.

This is what can happen to us. Global warming isn’t going to come in one astounding assault and kill us all with one blow. It’s just going to make survival harder — a lot harder — with regular assaults like floods, droughts, heat waves, killer storms.