this post was submitted on 13 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] 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Here’s a crazy thing no one talks about; Bugs. Dad taught me to clean the car’s windshield at every gas stop. Ya know, use the squeegee at the station? That was normal car maintenance. We’d often stop just for that purpose. Bug guts everywhere.

This. When I was a kid during the 90s, cars were covered in bugs during summer. Today there are bugs on windshields too, but compared to back then it's maybe only 10% of them. What also comes with the decliine in the insect population is a decline in the population of birds, because there are lesser and lesser natural habitats and food sources.

I am from Europe. What I also noticed is that, when you find insects or spiders and such, many of them are invasive and originally located in southern Europe. But each year they appear farther north, probably because of cilmate change.

For instance, the spider Zoropsis spinimana is a relatively new species in our region, and it's venomous*. Due to it's similarity it can be confused with Tegenaria domestica which is harmless to humans.

Also, with a warmer climate there are more ticks which are prone to spread diseases harmful to humans.

  • Addition: the bite of Zoropsis spinimana is compareable to a wasp sting and is only dangerous to people who have allergies against the venom.