this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2024
183 points (99.5% liked)

Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.

5143 readers
631 users here now

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.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 12 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Its absolutely insane to me that 118 countries tries to rely on the thing we are destroying to save it. I know the carbon sinks are just there doing their thing. But that just doesnt seem like solid logic in a fragile system. You need to place the excess carbon elsewhere.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

I read it like, we did rely on carbon sinks to keep doing their thing at a certain rate. Excess CO2 was a factor on top of that.

But now it seems we're seeing carbon sinks flat line, not keeping the steady state we had assumed was constant, unchanging.

If true, that's a hell of a tipping point. Am I reading you right?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 16 hours ago

I was more or less referring to relying on those sinks to hit carbon goals. I know they are there so its cheaper to include them. But we really need to be eliminating this completely without relying on nature. Especially if we want to continue our meddling as it is.