this post was submitted on 13 Nov 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] 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

That's a pity, I had been expecting level or a slight decrease in fossil CO2 (due to economy in China which has 1/3 of emissions), so maybe I was wrong, or maybe it's just too soon to say (they give error range -0.3% to +1.9%). There's still 1/6th of 2024 to go, including part of the NH winter whose heating demand varies with weather, most of the raw data that goes into these calculations is likely not so fresh, and chinese economic projections tend to be 'optimistic'. The rise in LUC CO2 is mainly hangover from tail of El Niño early this year, leading to fires in southern hemisphere. So it's still possible, if we think monthly, that the global peak was early this year, i.e. in the past.
Of course, they release GCB before the end of the year to try to influence the COP, which makes more sense when the COP is in mid-December (as typical, but not necessary - iirc COP1 was April and COP2 July). But does projected bad news really help motivate the world? I'd emphasise mixed news - some trends up, others down, which shows what difference we can make.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Yeah, it's roughly at a peak, with the first actual drop seeming more likely to happen next year, rather than this year.