this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2023
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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] 17 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (3 children)

They really argue about birds?! Not insects? Flowers? Plants? Bees?

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's a standard troll argument, yeah.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

There are "grassroots" movements claiming significant environmental damage from converting farmland to solar farms. Seriously.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Over here, there have been groups who put dead birds (often roadkill) underneath wind turbines.

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

I think it's because they can see the birds that turbines kill. The birds killed the the pollution fossil fuels cause are hard to notice and especially hard to link to the cause of death. When there's dead birds around a turbine, it's more obvious.

People don't look at numbers. They're driven by emotions, which favour what they can easily see and wrap their heads around. Or alternatively, what they are most scared of. Eg, nuclear power is far safer and less radioactive than coal. But that doesn't matter. People are afraid of nuclear because of past incidents they heard about. The way coal kills people is so much harder to notice than a dramatic HBO series.

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

And infinity% more than nuclear!!

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

Habitat loss due to uranium mining is certainly a thing. As is heating up of rivers for cooling the plant.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Skimmed the article for the reason of bird death.

They look at habitat loss due to fossil fuel mining and at the impact of acid rain caused by burning fossil fuels and mentioned climate change.

I have a feeling that these numbers could be shadowed when looking at the deaths caused by air pollution from coal plants. But I guess that must be difficult to assess.

[–] Repelle 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

With about 17,000,000 gigawat hours of electricity from fossil fuels each year, that’s about 160 million birds killed by fossil fuels annually. Cats are estimated to kill between 1.4 and 3.7 billion birds each year, why don’t we do something about the cat problem?

[–] beetus 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

We do. Some regions attempt to spay and neuter all cats found, such as parts of the US. Cats are very good predators and many conservation focused areas struggle to deal with them as well.

[–] Repelle 2 points 1 year ago

I mean, I know that, I’ve done TNRs before. But what we do is very little compared to the scope of the problem.