this post was submitted on 28 Nov 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 economics has let us down (www.theclimatebrink.com)
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[โ€“] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The best part of this argument is in the way economists and professionals are trying to base their discussions on money and finances when the option is the survival of the human species.

They are willing to risk all of humanity in order to save global finances.

We're screwed ... but at least those financial portfolios are safe.

[โ€“] neanderthal 2 points 1 year ago

I'm not an economist, but from my understanding, GDP isn't the end all be all if higher is better. It doesn't measure how much wealth you keep. It doesn't measure the utility of what is produced. Say we both have crotch kicking businesses. I go to you as a private individual, pay you $100 to kick my in the testicles, and then you come to my business as a private individual for the same service. We just made the GDP go up $200, and all we got out of it was sore genitals. Both of us are actually poorer because we will pay taxes one that money.

What does this have to do with climate? Say we replace all fossil fuels with renewables in a made up country on January of next year. We used to spend $1 trillion a year on fossil fuels. We spent 2 trillion on renewables, so our GDP went up that year by that trillion. A year later, it goes down by 1.5 trillion because we didn't have to buy oil. We are still better off than last year because we kept more of what we produced.