this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2024
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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.

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Car tires shed a quarter of all microplastics in the environment. Urgent action is needed (phys.org)
submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Electric cars are not THE solution.

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[–] grue 5 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

There is, fundamentally, one measurement that defines everything about the performance characteristics of a car: the amount of force it can impart on the road (and vice versa). This single measure defines its limits of acceleration, turning and braking. And what determines how much of that force is available?

The tires, and the coefficient of friction of the rubber compound they're made of, which is directly related to how quickly they wear. Every possible solution that makes tires wear less will also make cars perform worse.

...Well, short of drastically reducing weight (i.e. making a bicycle instead of a car).

...Or swapping them out for steel and running the thing on rails (i.e. making a train instead of a car).