this post was submitted on 07 Mar 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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Gen Z's climate anxiety is real and needs action -- for everyone's wellbeing (www.sciencedaily.com)
submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Don't a lot of issues come back to learned helplessness? I'm in a good place right now, and I do what I can, but I also feel so disenfranchised in the US political system that it all feels completely pointless.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

You don’t have to change your system, you must change your surroundings :)

If the system will come along, better. If not, you still kinda improved the life for those around you

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

I think it's a combination of learned helplessness and an unrealistic expectation of your ability to affect change.

As of July 1st, 2023, there are 334,914,895 million people participating in the US political system, I think it would be a little ridiculous if every one of them could influence our government. Not all the people can vote, but they're still participating in the political system whether they know it or not.

Each of these people have their own ideas, hopes, dreams, ideologies. It takes a long time to sway that much public opinion, even when you aren't fighting disinformation campaigns from powerful corporations and state actors. Keep at it and have realistic expectations about the impact you'll have and how quickly things will change.

Do what you can, live the best life you can, and don't take responsibility for things that aren't your fault.

Edit: corrected the population of the United States because people oddly focused on that part of my comment.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

As a non-American, I'm a bit confused. How are there 380 million people in the American political system? That's an entire Spain more than the population of the US

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

I dunno. In my lifetime there have been real movement on gay rights, and then real backsliding on women's rights. Things can change. The bigger roadblock feels like the difference between advocating for social changes that might incidentally have economic impacts vs. advocating for policy changes that directly harm the economics of wealthy people.