this post was submitted on 02 Dec 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:

Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Hah. Like I'm personally any kind of avatar on this stuff.

No, I'm not scolding anyone-- I'm pointing out how we could have responded effectively to the issue in the past tense, as it now appears we're ruddy-well borked, and pretty much missed ~95% of our biggest opportunities to make effective change. And in case you're wondering, these are hardly my unique thoughts, and in fact are attributable to much smarter, more aware people than I, across a range of science-based and sociological-based platforms & orgs. I'm merely a little canary who happened to be in the room, TBC.

Sure, any individual can say 'well I had my own life, job, interests, etc to pursue and couldn't be bothered with this shite,' but we're talking about the body of people across 40+ years. If they can't understand the forest is on fire or the mountain is about to landslide, then despite whoever their leadership is, in the end it's on them.

Indeed, we still have an absurdly high number of people in the States who don't even understand what ACC actually is, and of course are deeply resentful of the idea that humans had anything to do with it(!)

So blame whatever specific components you like if it makes you feel better, but in the end, it's a fundamental failing of our high-tech, freemarket-capitalism civilisation to address these crises in a reasonably prompt manner.

EDIT: I will of course say this-- if you're late to the game, and if you're late in absorbing and understanding this stuff, then yes... it's indeed a heavy pill to swallow, and I completely understand not feeling like you're personally responsible. And indeed, people in our relative class are barely responsible, compared to the reprehensible wealthy and exploitative corporations, especially those who promote real disinformation, such as the Koch Bros, right-wing extremists, bogus 'think tanks' and so forth.

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

Patronising, naive, self-righteous bullshit. I've been in this game a lot longer than you have and wagging your fingers at people will get you absolutely nowhere. The problem is power and you need to work on challenging it, not just whining because other people aren't doing enough to challenge it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Well, matey, you're certainly a bundle of fun, yourself... with deep respect to the power of projection.

In closing, may I ask what "game" you're thinking of, and especially-- does it involve understanding what the body of worldwide science orgs have been saying for many decades now..?