this post was submitted on 01 Aug 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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This Scientist Wants to Block the Sun to Cool the Earth (www.nytimes.com)
submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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In addition to actual reporting, the NYT creates newslike ads for the fossil fuels industry. This results in disproportionate attention on high-risk approaches that involve anything other than phasing out fossil fuel use.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Blocking the sun is not a practical solution. Putting something up in the atmosphere is untested and super dangerous. It could cause all life on Earth to die out like the Matrix.

Physically blocking the sun is also practically impossible. It requires that we put an object in space in a Lagrange point (gravitationally stable points around Earth) which is very far away and the sun shield would have to be approximately the size of Brazil. Launching that much material into space and getting it into position, and then unfurling it would be a HUUUUUUGE undertaking the likes of which we have never seen. Plus, launching all those rockets, mining the materials, etc, would emit so many tonnes of green house gasses that by the time we actually did it we might be in an even worse position.

[–] datelmd5sum 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

couldn't we like nuke the Moon or something?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

If we were speed running the extinction of humanity, then yes!