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:

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

No worries! I get corrected on things all the time. Thanks for taking it constructively instead of saying choice things about my mother.

Want even better news? The earth totally isn't fucked! Humans might be, but life on earth will probably be alright.

Edit: I got in trouble with crazies when I said "fine" before, so let me elaborate - I mean life will likely survive and in sufficient variety to have no issue rebounding.

The last big extinction event we had was the Permian-Triassic Extinction Event. Almost 90% of species died out. We're not quite sure what caused it (probably volcanoes), but CO2 levels were nearly 6x higher than now, the oceans were sulfurous, acidic, and oxygen starved, and global warming was leagues beyond where we're at now. Life bounced back and we're not even close in severity.

So should we keep fighting climate change? Hell yeah! But it's not as dismal as it seems.