this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2025
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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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Your choices do not exist in a vacuum. Earth is an interconnected community of living and non-living things says ethicist Patrick Effiong Ben of the University of Manchester. African philosophers like Jonathan Chimakonam and Aïda Terblanché-Greeff have a helpful concept for thinking through the weightiness of your decisions: complementarity.

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[–] spidermanchild 2 points 1 week ago

These are some really great points. This to me is a reflection of our (in particular US) view that energy is something unlimited and cheap. The idea that we might simply do less or optimize to anything other than profit is laughable to most folks, so efficiency barely enters the conversation except as a means to profit further in some niche cases after the fact. The organizational changes required to correct the issues you identified seem truly insurmountable, unfortunately, but you're absolutely right.