this post was submitted on 18 Jun 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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[–] MapleEngineer 8 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I've got $100 that says that the oil as gas industry paid for this research to allow them to keep pumping fossil fuels to keep the profits flowing. Sure, it will kill the oceans but that won't effect their profits in their lifetime.

[–] 3volver 4 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

The irony is that your negative comment ultimately supports them doing so because you're against any solution, but you do not bring any viable alternative into the discussion. Just stopping carbon emissions isn't enough, the can of worms is wide open, we need active solutions to sequester carbon dioxide rapidly.

[–] MapleEngineer -5 points 5 months ago

Holy shit, a straw man and a downvote. I may not recover from this.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Please don't buy into geoengineering. We need to repair our relationship to nature through rewilding. We should be changing the way we live, giving up large monoculture crop that goes toward animal husbandry and rewilding the planet to sequester carbon emissions. We are in this situation because our ancestors changed the land and the wildlife so radically in our attempts to industrialize. We overfished, killed whales, ran large predators into extinction, removed most old growth forest among many other things. Humans have tried geoengineering before, we dam rivers, flood planes, dig canals, level the earth and introduce species where they are not native, among large chemical, mineral, metal and other injections to the ground, sky and water. The climate models see carbon sequestration, SRM and geoengineering as attractive options because it lets us continue business as usual. We do need rapid change, of the way we live and with our relationship with the earth.

[–] 3volver 3 points 5 months ago

What you don't seem to understand is that we don't have time for that. Unfortunately rewilding will not happen, human greed is too strong, and everyone wants their own back yard. We need rapid and effective ways to get carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere NOW, and iron fertilization may be able to start that process. People can't even stop eating beef for fucks sake, and we know that's destroying the Amazon rainforest.

[–] homesweethomeMrL 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

What if we pollute in that direction, instead of stopping the polluting?

[–] 3volver 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Making the ocean more productive is not polluting.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

You are correct this is called geoengineering and it is born of the hubris of humans thinking they should control the planet like a machine or something. The person you replied to I believe is appealing to other people who think Promethean action is irresponsible and instead we need to modify our relationship with the environment, by not continuing down the path we are on.

[–] 3volver 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

We are already geoengineering whether we like it or not. We just aren't good at it, and we're heating up the climate rapidly. Look at how much carbon dioxide we've put into the atmosphere. We don't have a choice, doing nothing isn't an option, hoping people stop being greedy is not an option.

[–] ghostface 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

This is correct, the unknown experiment of removing sulfur from the upper atmosphere causing a more rapid heating of the ocean just ended.

There are talks of the decrease of whales and the loss of their scat, which is high in iron. If they are calculating the amount of iron in the ocean if those animals haven't been slaughtered... We would be kick starting the process

[–] 3volver 2 points 5 months ago

Whaling has caused irreparable harm to ocean ecosystems. We only recently learned that whales contribute largely to carbon sequestration due to what you wrote. Again, people who dismiss iron fertilization as a legitimate solution are a major concern. We need solutions to be implemented NOW.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_fall