this post was submitted on 01 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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In addition to actual reporting, the NYT creates newslike ads for the fossil fuels industry. This results in disproportionate attention on high-risk approaches that involve anything other than phasing out fossil fuel use.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 37 points 3 months ago (1 children)

This type of geoengineering feels real ripe for the law of unintended consequences.

[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago

I don't doubt that. However, mobilizing a truly sufficient "mundane" response may fail. If it does, the end result may indtead be a global response in the form of drastic geoengineering when the consequences of climate change are truly starting to have an effect.

The fact that these sorts of solutions exist is also why I really don't vibe with doomers. Climate change is not going to be the "end of the world", or even the end of civilization. Humanity will prevail, the real question is how. Climate change is a (relatively) slow catastrophy, and the worst case isn't everybody dead, but rather a miserable existence where where global standard of living is thrown back maybe a hundred years with the added bonus of our enviroment being generally miserable to live in.