this post was submitted on 09 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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[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Air traffic is unsustainable in general, you can take four people, have them ride a Suburban with a big V8 and they'll burn less fuel to travel the same distance compared to doing it by plane and that's not even considering the anti pollution equipment found on road legal vehicles that is pretty much non existent for aircrafts.

[–] Bytemeister 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

This is not even close to the truth.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Passenger airplanes burn about 4 to 5L/100km/passenger when they're full, a Suburban burns about 13.5L/100km mixed driving, that's about 3.4L/100km/passenger if there's 4 passengers in it.

[–] Bytemeister 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, but suburbans only carry two people. I know they have more seats than that, but realistically, they only carry two people.

Not to mention, you drive your suburban somewhere, and now you drive it is everywhere. Take a plane somewhere, and you either share a rental car, or you take public transit instead of driving the suburban.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Well if it's only two passengers then a Corolla with two passengers is better for the environment than an airplane.

I'm using the Suburban as an example to show what it's like for a family taking a vehicle that isn't efficient vs taking an airplane. The SUV wins.

Getting a rental car once you reach your destination is the same as driving your own car from an environmental perspective, the only difference is that you polluted more to reach your destination than if you had just taken your car from the beginning.

It's also possible to use ride sharing apps to fill up your car if you were otherwise going to travel alone.

The real solution is for people to stop traveling all over the world like they're doing right now, but if they want to continue traveling long distances then airplanes are the least efficient way to do it in most cases, cars, bus, trains are all much better for the environment but the best is to just not travel long distances at all.

Also, I'm just talking about fuel economy, emissions released by airplanes cause twice as much damage AND cars have catalytic converters to at least reduce other emissions, airplanes don't have that and if we look at smaller aircrafts with piston engines they even use leaded fuel!