this post was submitted on 02 Sep 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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Why carbon capture needs a reality check (youtu.be)
submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

That if is the biggest issue. These carbon calculations require a lot of math and assumptions and uncertainty to work. In the global economy with many steps along the path from source to sink, every actor has an incentive to make things look better than they actually are. So research on the topic has found a wide variety of issues with carbon offsets and other strategies that aren’t direct reductions of in emissions. So it’s pretty likely that net zero would not actually be net zero. Reducing emissions directly is much easier to verify.

Also, millions die from air pollution every year and net zero doesn’t do anything about that.