this post was submitted on 16 Apr 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] 10 points 2 months ago (5 children)

Isn't air travel and large ships far worse for the environment? I don't mean to derail a conversation, but I suspect that air travel and ocean liners have a significantly bigger impact and I don't see as much coverage on that issue.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Fortunately, we have a series of tubes connecting every computer on the planet that can help answer questions like this!

Source

In short Aviation (1.9%) and Shipping (1.7%) are smaller than Livestock & Manure (5.8%) even before factoring in the secondary impacts that are largely driven by the livestock industry, like land use change, soil loss, and deforestation.

If you're specifically talking about transportation emissions for food, there's a graph for that as well!

Supply chain represents ~18% of the overall food footprint, smaller than livestock and land use changes.

Source

Talking meat specifically, the transportation emissions are a tiny piece of their overall footprint, as is shown in the OP.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago

Damn these charts are nicely made.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 months ago

Agriculture makes up a full quarter of our total emissions. Some of that is because of shipping it, of course, but there is absolutely no question whatsoever that agriculture is a huge contributing factor to climate change

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago

Data about greenhouse emissions from transportation is talked about more frequently than any other source in my experience. I don't see the relevance to this data as beef and tofu can be produced locally or shipped overseas, so the emissions to produce the product would be a separate discussion versus emissions in transit.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago

I don’t see as much coverage on that issue.

No, there's plenty of coverage. If anything, there isn't enough coverage on animal agriculture because people can't fathom a world where they don't eat meat (or even just significantly reduce their consumption).

[–] [email protected] -3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

You are not derailing, you are putting the topic back on track.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

We can talk about both issues, as I think they are both important, but I suspect that the larger issue is being ignored because it threatens establishment interests.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

This dude's puns are seriously underrated