this post was submitted on 02 Feb 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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Once he had the answer, Arrhenius complained to his friends that he'd "wasted over a full year" doing tedious calculations by hand about "so trifling a matter" as hypothetical CO2 concentrations in far-off eras \(quoted in Crawford, 1997\).

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (2 children)

This lack of action, is this a human characteristic, a capitalist characteristic, or a Western characteristic? I ask because through most of recent history and especially today, it feels like the general population of each country has little to zero real control over what happens within their borders, be it at the local or national level. Would we still end up where we are today if a different socioeconomic system(s) dominated the world? I have this nagging feeling we wouldn't be in this mess if people had real control over their government's actions.

Like, if you could give anyone an objective viewpoint and ask them, hey, if we keep doing this there's a high chance we'll damage our children's or grandchildren's ability to produce and procure food and the weather will get really fucky in a bad way, they're going to say we need to change where we get energy asap. I don't believe they'll say anything else unless they think "we need to beat this other nation for reasons that don't benefit me," or "I need to keep doing what I'm doing because that's how I make money and there's no easy alternative."

It just feels like regular people haven't been in control since forever, we're not in control today, and we have no real legal means of seizing control. We either simply don't have control, or we technically do, but are manipulated so thoroughly by those with the means that we have no real control.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

What really bugs me is that the people who are actually in control have so much money that anything that happens to us low lives will not affect them.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

They definitely act like it

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

My bet is on capitalism. Capitalism by its very nature pushes for unsustainable growth.

It also has a habit of subverting democracy.