this post was submitted on 19 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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Airlines say they’ve found a route to climate-friendly flying (www.vox.com)
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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

the US produces a massive surplus of corn (questionable government subsidies), only a tiny portion “sweet corn” (not shown on upper graph) is ever meant for the table

the VAST majority of US corn is relatively inedible “feed corn” meant for agricultural feed lots (blue bars, “Feed and residual use”) and industrial chemical manufacturing – ethanol (orange bars, “Alcohol for fuel use”), and fertilizers, food additives, etc. (gray bars, “Other food, seed, and industrial use”)

EDIT: check out Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006) to get an idea of how dependent US is on industrial corn