this post was submitted on 27 Sep 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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[–] protist@mander.xyz 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

“For decades now, scientists have been warning us that extreme weather events will be exacerbated by this blanket of carbon pollution we’ve been wrapping around our planet,” said Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy.

I don't know how I feel about framing carbon dioxide emissions as "pollution." All this carbon has been in the atmosphere before, it's just been trapped in the ground for hundreds of millions of years. There's got to be a way to talk about that so low information people get it. They definitely don't see carbon dioxide as pollution, since it's intangible and a healthy portion of our atmosphere

[–] sonori 2 points 1 month ago

I mean sulfur is also a natural part of our atmosphere that geologic activity has been spewing out into the air for as long as earth has had air, but I’m still going to call it pollution if you’re power plant pumps a vast quantity of it into the atmosphere and now it’s raining acid on me.

We have more than doubled the amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, with half of that doubling having been done in the last thirty years alone. The very oceans are acidifying to the point large swaths of marine life are being wiped out, and thousands to hundreds of thousands of people are being killled by the effects of global warming each and every year. It’s pollution, it’s just the pollution is on such a vastly larger and more dangerous scale than any acid rain or smog people are used to thinking about.