this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
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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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‘Climate Optimism’ Is Dangerous and Irrational (www.currentaffairs.org)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Overly-confident math models based on unrealistic assumptions are used to avoid crisis-consistent climate policies and to protect global elite privilege, while abandoning our duties to the planet’s most vulnerable.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It's worth reading the full article — the big concerns are that:

  • We're not living in the worst-case scenario, but it's still necessary to get emissions down to zero
  • large-scale negative-emissions technologies are pretty unlikely, so it's more important to end fossil fuel use than the models indicate

None of this in any way reverses the idea that if we actually got to zero emissions, we'd see temperatures stabilize, or that it's impossible to do just that.