this post was submitted on 09 Aug 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] 56 points 3 months ago (2 children)

The North Yorkshire power plant, which burns wood pellets imported from North America

So the trees are grown in America, processed in America and then transported across the Atlantic before getting to Yorkshire? That must use up all the carbon budget before it's even burnt, surely?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

The underlying problem is that it's on net reducing forest cover in North America, but that reduction in forest cover counts against the US emissions budget, rather than the UK one. This kind of shell game where you push emissions into another country doesn't really solve anything.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Honestly it might not. I don't have any actual numbers to offer here, but the sheer size of modern cargo ships often makes then surprisingly carbon efficient despite the horrid fuel they use

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

We can still ban bunker fuel.

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

We can and we should, yes

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 months ago

For regular products it is actually the remaining way per truck that accounts for the majority of their footprint. Kinda why I usually roll my eyes when people cry about dirty cargo ships, while likely driving their own personal car. There's so many areas that would be more important to tackle first.

The whole concept of using wood pellets is bonkers though. You're basically using land to grow trees to burn them, which is stupidly inefficient and certainly not sustainable. It's pretty much a form of greenwashing, to give people the illusion of climate neutral energy production (similar to things like bio & e-fuels).