this post was submitted on 10 Oct 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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The US is spending billions to build direct-air-capture plants. But some fear the projects won’t succeed unless the government buys more of what they’re selling. (www.technologyreview.com)
submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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This has been one of the inherent problems with any kind of carbon removal — there's no real way to profit from it, so it was unlikely to happen at scale bigger than a PR operation unless government either pays for it or requires firms to pay for it.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Large-scale tree planting can remove some CO2 from the atmosphere, but nowhere near as much as humans add by extracting and burning fossil fuels. See https://skepticalscience.com/1-trillion-trees-impact.html for a detailed assessment of what this looks like.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

You are on to the issue yourself. First and foremost we need to stop releasing CO2. That in and of itself is not enough, but the most important bit. Some countries (a lot?) has enough tree cover to offset a huge chunk of their CO2 emissions today by trees. Some might even be CO2 neutral, had it not been for the use of wood for fuel. Therein lies the potential. And this is already a mature industry with market dependencies well established.

Resembling this CO2 uptake with man made processes will require a monumental investment in both monetary and energy terms and the output will be pitiful when the net effect is calculated.

So slamming the effect of trees, which does not require any of that development and investment costs because it doesn't solve the entire problem, because it isn't a silver bullet is rather short sighted. It is already today the best tool we have to sequester carbon from the atmosphere for cheap and with a comoditiezed biproduct.