this post was submitted on 09 Dec 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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Car tires shed a quarter of all microplastics in the environment. Urgent action is needed (phys.org)
submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Electric cars are not THE solution.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 week ago

Plus, there’s a ton of pollution and other environmental damage caused by battery production that at least partly offsets the lack of tailpipe emissions.

The battery production pollution is an issue, however one thing to keep in mind is that once the minerals are out of the ground they can be recycled, unlike drilling for oil. When looked at on a long timeline the battery for an electric vehicle is a lot cleaner than everything needed to power an ICE vehicle.

That said, there's always room for improvement and we should never get complacent. But we don't avoid innovation just because it isn't perfect.