this post was submitted on 16 Oct 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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Before the Paris agreement, humanity was on track to cause a potentially catastrophic 3.5°C (6.3°F) global warming by the year 2100. Currently on track for ~2.5°C (4.5°F) warming by 2100 (yaleclimateconnections.org)
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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

2.5 is on the 'optimistic' side of things, but not unreasonable. I check the Climate Action Tracker (CAT) once or twice a year, I think they summarize current projections pretty well. Our current "policies & action" is around 2.7 or 2.8 degrees. Which would be really bad.

https://climateactiontracker.org/global/temperatures/

I'm not completely sure but I think the "1.5" number is regarding a long-term trend, not one portion of one year. We're at around 1.2 now according to the CAT thermometer (select Global -> The CAT Thermometer). You can look at specific countries like the USA as well.