this post was submitted on 07 May 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] 13 points 7 months ago (1 children)

How do I mail a demon core?

[–] mkwt 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Buy a cheap box truck, find someone desperate. Offer him $20k to make minimal stops and blow all the weigh stations.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

I like that you mentioned weigh stations for some reason. I used to be good at skirting those when I worked for a sketchy outfit. Two man show: boss and me, and I was too young to ask the right questions.

[–] mkwt 1 points 7 months ago

Since the question specifically asked about mailing, I specifically recommend one of those hard sided Pelican cases, with the cut-to-form foam inserts.

You'll pay a fortune in postage.

I'm not sure if the postal service routinely scans parcels with a Geiger counter. If they do, you might consider paying an even larger fortune to ship shielding.

The real engineering challenge is the mechanism that triggers the criticality event. Demon core was able to kill the people it killed, because they were using jankety-ass stuff like screwdrivers to hold the hemispheres apart. Getting a mechanism that works reliably when you want it to, and not when you don't is hard. For the first few years of nuclear weapons, it was not allowed to insert the nuclear pits into the bombs until the plane had taken off with positive attack orders. Imagine trying to jimmy a core into a bomb casing in the bomb bay of a B-29 while it's traversing 800 nm of hostile waters to Japan. Sounds crazy, but that's what they did.

Anyhow, mechanisms are hard. It took at least twenty or thirty years to get to something that has a "reasonable" level of safety. And if you see the blue light, you're probably already a goner.

[–] sicarius 1 points 7 months ago

Very very carefully, drop it in a postbox and run!