this post was submitted on 06 Jun 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:

Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.

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

Who is "we"? I've never ever ever seen a carbon capture and storage demonstration that was even within an order of magnitude of the cost of simply reducing emissions, or planting trees.

CCS is a pipe dream being pushed by fossil fuel companies to justify inaction.

We need to be acting as if it will never work. Keep funding research, because it could be a way to fast track climate recovery, but on all other roads assume it does absolutely nothing.

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

Remember it takes at least as much energy to pull the carbon back from the oxygen as how much was released when the carbon was burned and bonded with the oxygen. And because of reasons it's more like 3 to 4 times as much and because humans aren't that clever it's probably closer to 10 times as much.

This means we have to pay the bill to put back all of the carbon from fossil fuels we've been burning for the past 100 years. This is an amount of money we can't even begin to fathom. And because we are slow at it, we also get taxed on top of that as climate change leads to economic loss in a variety of interesting ways.

There are no shortcuts, there are no quick fixes. We need to stop burning fossil fuels right now and start fixing shit. Now we have had a pause in the growth of fossil fuel burning, but the rate is still insanely high and at peak levels. Even though the growth has stopped, it hasn't shrunk either. And it's very possible the dip was only due to the impact of covid and for 2024 onwards it will start growing again.

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

Carbon capture is a farce.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

CCS should only ever be used to draw down existing carbon, not to greenwash fossil fuels.

And that's ignoring the many problems of any CCS method that isn't burying biochar under a mountain.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Yes. And this is from someone who lives in an area where it’s seen as cool to produce as much black exhaust as possible.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

How else am I meant to tell people I definitely have a massive peen?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

My wife and I call them tiny pee-pee trucks.

The guy driving the family minivan got nothing to prove, and you know his works.