this post was submitted on 20 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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The climate threat of methane gas expansion is growing, and the public remains largely unaware — in part because of misinformation and misleading terminology. (heated.world)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Burning methane actually reduces it's greenhouse has potential by turning it into CO2. Not saying we should expand extraction of methane if it leads to methane leakage, but if methane is going to go into the atmosphere anyways it would be climate friendly to capture it and burn it for heat or electricity. A Landfill near me collects the methane that the garbage produces and pipes it to greenhouses to burn for heat and CO2 that contribute to crop yields.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Yes, for methane which would have otherwise entered the atmosphere, as with landfill gas.

The big issue is that we're extracting methane in order to burn it, so both the CO2 from burning it, plus the leaked methane along the way are causing additional warming.