this post was submitted on 12 Nov 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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Revealed: Big Oil Told 70 Years Ago That Fossil Fuel Emissions Could Impact ‘Civilization’ (www.desmog.com)
submitted 3 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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New documents show how a deceptive PR strategy pioneered in 1950s California first exposed the risk of climate change and then helped the industry deny it.

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

The main problem with carbon removal is that it's expensive, and removing it doesn't produce a product you can sell. So in practice, doing something like what you describe within a generation requires a system of taxation which absorbs 40% or so of total economic output, and uses it to sequester carbon. That seems, to put it mildly, politically very difficult.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

You're correct on the marketability. You either sell it to be released later defeating the purpose, or by hopefully sequestering it to help with extraction of fossil fuel, which again...maybe not worth it. To actually remove massive amounts of CO2 and permanently take it out of the cycle is akin to burying money.

I see the main problem not as the cost, but the scalability. Our best efforts so far don't even amount to a fraction of a percent. There have been recent developments that could help some, so that would be a percentage of our annual emissions. A long way to go when the preferable solution is to remove emission amounts not only being emitted, but past years' amounts too.