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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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] 20 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Wouldn't cutting down emissions be less precarious, easier to implement gradually, less unpredictable, more economically feasible in the long run, and less risky to fall on our heads?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 months ago

All of those except that it means less profits for the people who own big oil.

[–] grandkaiser 2 points 3 months ago

Global warming is not something that would have been prevented by not industrializing. It would have instead been slower and more gradual, but inevitable all the same. What is fucking the planet is not the fact it's happening, it's the rate at which it's happening. If all human-created global emissions were to cease immediately today, disasters would still happen regardless. This is why some scientists are proposing geoengineering solutions: to prevent the inevitability regardless of CO2 release.

[–] sudo42 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

If we eliminated all CO~2~ emissions tomorrow, we would still be stuck with all the CO~2~ we've already released. A lot of the CO~2~ we've released has been taken up by the oceans. We have to find a way to sequester that C0~2~ "back in the ground" in order to back to levels we had years ago in order to head off/reverse global climate change.