this post was submitted on 28 May 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:

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

If you just burned fossil fuel to generate electricity instead of using gas or diesel, you would still have a net reduction in emissions simply due to the net efficiency difference between large power generators and ICEs. Also, much of that pollution wouldn't be where as many people are living, which would have health benefits. All this ignores cleaner power generation options.

Sure non-car options are superior where they're feasible and should definitely be looked at. But for a lot of places and people, that isn't an option now, and won't be for another 10 years. So maybe we should think about ways to get there without literally setting the world on fire.