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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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)
  • It's not all the earth, nor all the time, even in future projections. The jet-set, who also control news media, fly for holidays and live in air-con, both of which make the problem worse. Dubai even has ski-slopes.
  • 'News' over-emphasises 'breaking' surprise events, drowns gradually evolving statistics - boiling frogs. Maybe learn to comment on 'news' events with equivalent numbers due to climate change impacts?
  • Exaggeration and blaming other groups just lead to fatalistic doom. Although temperatures rose in the last decade, the projections for end of century fell due to policies, although not enough it's important to emphasise that we still have choices.
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Cooling is less bad for the environment than heating. The reason being, cooling moves heat from one place to another - it does increase heat overall, but only from its inefficiencies, it's not the goal. Heating, in most cases, is just creating heat. Unless you have a heat pump, you're burning some fuel to create heat, which adds a great deal of heat to the environment.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Well, air-con cooling and heat pump are basically the same, the plan (not yet reality) is that we'll all transition to renewable-powered heat pumps. In either case, insulation matters - I was surprised when staying in Brazil (decade ago), how rare was double glazing (despite noisy streets). Anyway I still think ski-slopes in the hot desert, around mega-cities grown on oil and aviation-hubs, is crazy.