this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2023
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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.

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World's richest 10% produce half of global carbon emissions, says Oxfam (2015) (slrpnk.net)
submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/02/worlds-richest-10-produce-half-of-global-carbon-emissions-says-oxfam

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[–] Pohl 12 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Rating wealth by income (which this study does) is unusual and difficult. I don’t actually see any income numbers attached to their analysis which is suspicious.

Anyway, anyone with a net worth of around 90k USD is in that top 10%. Median net worth in the US was 127k in 2019. Which means that more than half of the 350M people in this country are in the worlds richest 10% (by wealth)

Picking a random American off the street gives you better than coin toss odds of finding a person in the “mega polluter” group you see in the thumbnail graph.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Even doing everything you can to "reduce carbon footprints" it's still going to be orders of magnitude larger than a small village farmer in the middle of Nepal.

Doesnt mean it's not worth doing, it just means there's a lot more to be done.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Still though, if you're gonna split up that top 10% into 10 more parts, you will probably once again find that the top 1% is responsible for most of the emissions that the top 10% is responsible for.