this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2024
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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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Car tires shed a quarter of all microplastics in the environment. Urgent action is needed (phys.org)
submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Electric cars are not THE solution.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Less rubber is good but we really need a rubber replacement that is biodegradable.

Nickel alloys are expensive and require some nasty mining so shape memory tires are a stopgap solution at best.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Material sciences is a difficult field. People spend years researching one small area just to shelve their research as not viable, too cost prohibitive, or impractical for large scale manufacturing.

I haven't seen any research into durable biodegradable materials that could hold the weight of vehicles unfortunately, so I think investment will be hard to come by. Though I don't disagree with the premise that something that can degrade over time, but also not harm the environment would be an ideal solution to the problem. I imagine if such a thing were created it would be able to be applied to many other industries, not just transportation.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

Michelin and Bridgestone have shown off proof of concept biodegradable tires but nothing to the market yet. It is possible, and will take incremental progress as you say. I’d like to see more work and updates on this.