this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
1238 points (98.2% liked)

Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.

5246 readers
720 users here now

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:

Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
1238
Climate timeline (programming.dev)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
69 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I don't care if it is caused by humans or natural causes ( and it's likely both). The issue is that it's a problem, because we've evolved to live in a cool environment (relative to wherever this is going). Part of responsibly using this planet we find ourselves on is terraforming it to sustainably and efficiently suit our needs. I support decarbonization because it helps. But due to other natural factors effecting our environment for the worse (as far as we as a species are concerned), we will need to take more artificial measures to cool the planet in the future.

But the first step is decarbonization. We have two choices - accept natural inefficiencies and extreme conditions, and slowly lose our intelligence in exchange for resilience (evolutionary "crabification"), or terraform the planet to a constant, efficient environment to continue developing as an intelligence.

We are caught, environmentally, in a neutral zone between extreme fluctuations that will continue until the earth cools entirely from its formation. We did not exist during the last extreme. And if we do not prevent the next, our species will not survive.