this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2024
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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] 11 points 7 months ago (2 children)

We recommend four widely applicable high-impact (i.e. low emissions) actions with the potential to contribute to systemic change and substantially reduce annual personal emissions: having one fewer child (an average for developed countries of 58.6 tonnes CO2-equivalent (tCO2e) emission reductions per year), living car-free (2.4 tCO2e saved per year), avoiding airplane travel (1.6 tCO2e saved per roundtrip transatlantic flight) and eating a plant-based diet (0.8 tCO2e saved per year). These actions have much greater potential to reduce emissions than commonly promoted strategies like comprehensive recycling (four times less effective than a plant-based diet) or changing household lightbulbs (eight times less).

^https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541/pdf^

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Look at how much impact that first thing has, y'all. If you convince one person not to have another child that has the same impact as convincing sixty people to go plant based.

Fighting for reproductive rights is one of the most impactful things you can do for the climate.

Save the Earth, have an abortion.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Very true but these are separate things and both can be done.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Or convince 2-3 people to give up meat. If they each convince 2-3 people who each convince 2-3 people who… ok, I’ll stop…. But the point stands. They don’t even need to stop, just reduce their meat consumption.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Right so just convince literally everyone to go vegan. Sure.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 7 months ago

Yes, that’s exactly what I said /s

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

More people is more minds working on solutions.