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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This Scientist Wants to Block the Sun to Cool the Earth (www.nytimes.com)
submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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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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[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

In this case, it hasn't been happening intentionally at a meaningful scale; you'd be able to look up and see the thin haze from it, and use a spectrometer to figure out that it's not water vapor.

What has happened is that ordinary sulphur mixed with fossil fuels has produced particulates lower in the atmosphere. These turn into sulfuric acid when in contact with water, resulting in acid rain. Policies to sharply lower sulfate particle emissions have resulted in that becoming far less of a problem, but also accelerated warming in recent years.