this post was submitted on 29 Aug 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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America Is Using Up Its Groundwater Like There’s No Tomorrow (www.nytimes.com)
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[–] reddig33 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You joke, but we actually do need desalination plants — starting yesterday. Water will be the new oil soon.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yes, we definitely do. We are already seeing the result of not thinking ahead in the southwest. I’m not really joking about the plants. We need nuclear plants to provide the clean energy to desalinate on the levels we need to sustain agriculture and cities without contributing to global warming.

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

... or maybe switch to a less water intensive form of agriculture ?

Edit : I mean, how sustaining a wasteful practice with a huge wasteful infrastructure is progress ?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

We can and should do both.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Maybe we should, but I'm not sure we can - because one (nuclear + desalination) acts as a disincentive to the other (actually chaning practice).

Also, building a nuclear reactor takes a lot of time (do we have it ?), changing agricultural practices can start right now and scale progressively.