this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2024
147 points (98.7% liked)

Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.

5205 readers
1446 users here now

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:

Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
147
Germany’s emissions hit 70-year low as it reduces reliance on coal (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
20 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Despite this fall in coal reliance, the thinktank said, “most of the emissions cuts in 2023 are not sustainable from an industrial or climate policy perspective”.

Müller said: “The crisis-related slump in production weakens the German economy. If emissions are subsequently relocated abroad, then nothing has been achieved for the climate.”

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

You are right that mining is dirty as hell and if we only consider the ecological impact of mining then nuclear is a much better solution than renewables energy.

For the whole world to transition to renewables energy the production of copper will need to be multiplied by 2.7 in 2040 compared to 2020 levels, rare earth by 7.3, lithium by 42 ! ...

Uranium mining is terrible for environment but so is copper mining, cobalt mining, lithium extraction ... Since uranium is so dense energetically we only need a very tiny amount of it to produce electricity so overall the mining impact of nuclear is much lower than renewables energies.

The amount of copper and other minetals used for renewable energy is way higher than nuclear, these have to be mined too.

I'm not advocating for nuclear but there is so much disinformation around it that does not help the debate.