this post was submitted on 19 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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[–] [email protected] 25 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Per capita they're still waaay lower than the USA. And they're implementing public transit and renewable power faster than most other countries.

That's not even considering how much Chinese manufacturing is solely for Western consumption.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 days ago (1 children)

China's per capita emissions are also waaay higher then those of the EU for example, while the EU's emissions are falling and China's are rising. Also China's emissions fall by about 10%, when you adjust for trade.

The big problem is more that the countries most responsible for climate change is changing. The West emissions are falling, whereas non Western countries emissions are rising. So the West argues that climate reparations should be paid by the countries emitting the most and not by the countries who have the most money. They are related, but not the same. Also that that bases needs to be adjusted over time.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Still, it is worth emphasising that China’s emissions remain far behind those of the EU on a per-capita basis.

When weighting historical emissions per head of population in 2024, China’s contribution is just 227tCO2 per capita, less than a third of the 682tCO2 for people in the EU27.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago

When historically weighted. Currently China puts out much more per capita per year (8.4t per capita to Europe’s 5.6t). The US and Canada are still way above that, but they’re pretty consistently going down year over year while China is only going up.