this post was submitted on 12 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] 12 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I’m shocked. Shocked I say. How could we have known that punishing the companies we know are destroying the planet basically do whatever they want, with a pinky-promise they’ll do the right thing, would be a bad idea?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Do they even promise it will benefit local populations? The issue is that even if they are good projects from a viewpoint of carbon (which the companies argue), the global north is still ofsetting their emissions in the global south. Large swathes of land are reserved by these companies, with little or no benefit to the local population, only so they can keep their business models afloat in the western world. It's just yet another form of neocolonialism.

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

For sure! Those promises aren’t exactly binding, and they probably came up with excuses at the same time, and there aren’t any serious consequences to fucking it up so long as voters in their home country stop paying attention quickly enough(and they’re conservatives and centrists mostly so practically by definition they aren’t even paying attention in the first place).