this post was submitted on 18 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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Unintended warming: How reduced ship [sulfate aerosol] emissions may accelerate climate change (cpo.noaa.gov)
submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 31 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Hmm, cutting sulfur dioxide emissions for health reasons is bad for global warming because sulfur dioxide clouds have a net cooling effect with reflection.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 months ago (1 children)

This is surprisingly often the case. At a short term scale, improvements in the local environment are at odds with improvements towards preventing climate change (hydropower is the poster child for this). Long term though, it's almost always better to prioritize the large scale, as failing to limit climate change will ultimately make any efforts to protect local environments futile.

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

What do you mean by the hydropower? I'm not familiar with this 'poster child'

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

FYSA: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poster_child

As described in the second half of that article, it's a colloquialism.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

Usually, for a hydro power plant to be effective they require a dam to be built. This significantly changes the surrounding landscape by flooding large areas of land and also reduces the ability of fish to travel through whichever waterway is dammed up.

Enviromental activists often decry and try to prevent these types of developments because of this - they consider these changes to ruin the local environment.

On the other hand, hydropower is possibly the most useful source of renewable electricity, having a large implicit storage capacity that can be released at any moment.

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

Same with trains, in the UK swampy famously protested the building of a high speed rail line because it's construction resulted in the destruction of an old growth forrest

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

Fish ladders can be built for them to cross dams but the flooding is a problem

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

I'm pretty sure we can find other reflective chemicals that won't cause grass-wilting acid rains.