this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2024
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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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[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago

You've got some downvotes ... and there's a pretty strong "don't be obnoxious to people if you want to persuade them to do something" attitude here ... which I generally agree with.

Just to provide my own sentiment here ... at a broad, like "historical" level ... it does bother me that it seems like we've kinda become this coddled culture. Yes, we can be obnoxious about how our choices are better than someone else's bad choices.

But having frank discussions about what choices and actions are good and bad without getting stuck into ego shit fights is not only healthy but I'd argue pretty fundamental. And that includes whether it makes sense for an issue to be elevated to the government/regulatory level ... and then ... how we as the electorate are going effect that (because in the end, leadership from government these days isn't really a thing ... which is also part of the this coddled "make every feel good about themselves" culture I feel).

I recently started calling this something like "secondary climate denial" (which I got from somewhere I can't remember). The idea being that a fair amount of people (myself included I'd say) have acquired a sort of learnt helplessness and passiveness about the climate crisis ... have learnt to deny the possibility of there being things that they can actually do and that are actually worth doing. Sometimes we expect things to be more effective and more quickly than is reasonable, so we do nothing. Sometimes we think the world is too big and powerful for us to move it, so we give up.

Sometimes we get worried about letting perfect be the enemy of good and so we give up. And what have we all got to show for it ... what have we actually done?!

If/when it goes to shit and we're sitting grand-children who are asking us why we didn't stop it from happening and what we actually did ... are we really going to be satisfied that, well, we had some arguments online about it and tried to eat vegan as much as possible? Won't the grand-children then say "I'm vegan too, but what did you do to stop it? Didn't you do anything?"