this post was submitted on 19 Oct 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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[–] Recant 8 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

Burning anything is never clean. I have heard the "it burns clean" so many times.

From what I read in the article, its true that natural gas burns with fewer CO2 emissions than coal or oil. However, over a 20 year timeframe natural gas production, distribution, and consumption produces more methane than than either oil or coal. Since methane is a more powerful greenhouse gas, the increased emission of it, surpasses any benefit from fewer CO2 emissions.