this post was submitted on 26 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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Reality check on technologies to remove carbon dioxide from the air (news.mit.edu)
submitted 3 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] spicystraw 9 points 3 days ago (2 children)

But, we do have "technology" for direct carbon capture. Trees and plants. It will consume a lot of valuable real-estate, but we could plant a lot of plant life which would use carbon for growth.

There is just not enough will and to much economy incentives to not terraform earth.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 days ago (1 children)

You can do that, but not at anywhere near the scale of current emissions from fossil fuel burning.

Actually making any kind of removal meaningful means scaling down fossil fuel use to near zero compared with current extraction and burning.

[–] spicystraw 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Agreed, fossil energy sources add more climate gases to the eco balance. I suppose the original idea of "carbon capture" was to capture the excess and store it back under ground.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Or the original idea was to run a PR exercise for the fossil fuels industry, creating social permission to keep on extracting and burning.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

Yeah, trees are pretty amazing! There's also a mammoth amount of carbon capture in the ocean (more than land) mostly via plankton but also sea grass and the like.

Trees play a massive role in the ecosystem we're part of aside from just being carbon stores. If we just focus on carbon storage and invent new tech that does that, it might somewhat improve the situation, but we're really just kicking the can down the road, and waiting for our extraction based economy to cause chaos somewhere else.