this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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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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The study is this one

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The trace gases for sure; the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol has been ratified by the key countries which manufactured them, and their use in new equipment ended about a year ago.

Fossil fuel use phase-out is getting started. It very roughly looks like this:

  • Generate electricity without using fossil fuels
  • Electrify everything we can
  • Stop doing the things we can't

It's unclear if fossil fuel phase-out will happen at a pace fast enough to limit the warming to 2°C above what it was in the late 1800s.

Deforestation is proceeding at a slower pace in some parts of the world due to local political change. Not everywhere though, and there's a lot of work still.

Cutting the ruminant herd...not even started yet.

What I do know is that every person out there has the power to put their thumb on the scale of politics and policy and industry just a tiny bit to make it happen. And it's worth trying.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's definitely worth trying. The issue I see is simply that not enough people believe that to be true. I don't think that's going to change either. The people who aren't concerned now aren't going to change their tune until the 11th hour and even then the attitude will shift from "it's not happening" to "it's too late to fix now".

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Only thing you can do there is to encourage the people around you and show them what trying is like

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

The people around you can't make a dent in this crisis. The ones that need convincing are the CEO's of the most greedy companies in the world.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Sure they can: by controlling government. You can't change the mind of some wealthy CEO, but you can make it easy for people to avoid becoming their customers, and then make what they've been doing a crime.