this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023
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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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What Biden has done is to cut the issuance of drilling leases to the minimum required by law, pass the Inflation Reduction Act, enact a regulation to force vehicle electrification, and similarly force fossil fuels out of most power plants.

What Biden has not done: stop issuing drilling permits or impose export restrictions on fossil fuels. The former has some serious limits because of how the courts treat the right to drill as a property right once you hold a drilling lease, and the latter is simply untested.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Not exactly. Most references to 1.5C are about the long term average hitting that level, not an individual year.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Given the trend, it's a pretty strong indicator we're there. What is long-term in the context of a change over 10-20 years, that's reaching a breakaway point?

You understand that when things are steadily moving in one direction, we'd need to overshoot the difference between the start of the reference period and the 1.5 degree figure by 100%(incorrectly assuming linear change - the reality is more exponential - far worse by the time it shows up)

For example - for a 1.5C change over 6 years, starting at 0C:

  • Year 0 - real temp 0, average 0

  • Year 3 - real temp 1.5, average 0.75

  • Year 6 - real temp 3, average 1.5

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

The year to year variation is much larger than the underlying increase. We could easily see several years with the anomaly under 1.5C before