this post was submitted on 05 Aug 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:

Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.

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[–] [email protected] -1 points 4 months ago (8 children)

Lol.

In 50 years you'll be dead from the earth is on fire and uninhabitable poisoning.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago (7 children)

Honestly I am of the opinion that climate change is far less of an existential threat to humanity than mutually assured destruction was. Ecosystems are gonna collapse and lots of people are going to die. I think the true climate change doomer pill isn't that it's too late and the world is doomed, it's that the people living in the global north will not make the sacrifices needed to stop the climate catastrophes that will happen in the global south. We could all go vegan tomorrow and cause the largest single decrease in greenhouse emissions. We could all stop buying products that are made unsustainably and unethically in countries that are supposedly no longer colonised. But we won't. No one will pay higher prices for the same products. No one will make an effort to change their lifestyle. And no one will care that other people, far away, will die because of it. Entire cultures will be erased and we will not lose sleep over knowing that we let it happen because it was easier than doing something about it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (6 children)

Actually there is a serious risk that Earth turns into Venus. Perpetually self-reinforcing green house effect. All life on Earth, fried, for all eternity.

Edit: Well, until the sun blows.

[–] spidermanchild 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Isn't the carbon were releasing now from fossil fuels carbon that used to be in the atmosphere? What self reinforcing mechanisms will allow for temperatures roughly beyond what has already occurred, which still sustained life?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Briefly, they're wrong. I responded in detail above.

You are correct, what we're burning as fossil fuels is largely the remains of millions of years of vegetative and microbial life, altered due to heat, pressure, and time. Millions of years of time.

All that carbon making up those organisms was fixed from the atmosphere. While biological functions have been busy fixing CO2, volcanoes, the Earth's mantle, and even some geochemical processes release CO2. If not for biological fixation, the atmosphere's CO2 content would be higher.

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