this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2024
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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.

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Climate science has been stymied as Russia continues its war in Ukraine. The stalled work threatens to leave the West without a clear picture of how fast the Earth is heating up.

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[–] [email protected] -1 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

Fuck Russia let's sink their shit.

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

Don't worry, when the former permafrost becomes bog land the methane sink release will ignite the atmosphere.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

the former permafrost becomes bog land

This can happen

the methane sink release will ignite the atmosphere.

This is a bunch of words, but not something that we're actually facing.

The permafrost wasn't so much a methane sink, as a place where carbon got stored. When it warms up, the decay process can generate methane, which can then be released. Under some limited conditions, you can actually even burn it when released from natural sources like this, but that's not usually what happens — it just floats off into the atmosphere.

The atmosphere as a whole will not ignite.

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

As far as I understood, it'll leak into the atmosphere, where it'll cause 80 or 100 times more warming than CO² for a decade or so, before breaking down into good, old CO², causing further warming for centuries / millennia.

Not sure, but I think I've also read that in the process of breaking down into CO², the ozone layer gets damaged.