this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2024
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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.

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Why scientists are trying to reengineer the cow's stomach | Scientists in California are working to genetically engineer the cow microbiome -- and in the process, eliminate methane emissions. (wapo.st)
submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I'll note that if this works, it solves the methane problem, but not the land use problem associated with cattle.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Artificial selection and gene editing aren't exactly the same thing. Also, trying to use technology to get out of technology-caused problems (the issues from raising and slaughtering tens of billions of bovine a year) is a modern techbrobillionaire-promoted pipedream, like us being able to colonize mars when we fail to address human-caused climate change on this planet

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Technical solutions aren't crazy; we've pulled them off before for other problems. (Eg: sewage)

It's a question of whether the specific tradeoffs associated with a particular technical approach to a particular problem are worthwhile.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

I never said technical solutions were crazy. I just mean to draw attention to the fact that we're reading a story published in a publication owned by the world's richest man that says we don't need to curb consumption currently causing a huge amount of greenhouse gas emissions that we know beyond all reasonable doubt are killing our planet and compromising the longevity of our species - because a sometime-in-the-future technology will rescue things, enabling us to keep consuming at levels that are unsustainable in many other areas beyond methane emissions.

We are in the midst of a great propaganda effort to undermine concern about planetary health in the masses so that the investor class' profits don't slow down as the planet turns to shit. This article is a part of that