this post was submitted on 17 Nov 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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[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

How far do you travel and how much is your gas that you're going to save 5 or $600 quickly on 2-3 days a week?

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

It is reasonable to save $5/day on gas alone. So $1000/5 = 200 days, or 100 weeks. That is just on gas savings alone, you will save on maintenance costs as well.

If you can get rid of a car completely, then there is much more because you are not paying insurance and license fees (these are generally fixed costs that you pay even if you don't drive), and most people don't have a paid off car so even more savings (plus the income from selling the car).

Note that I said sell one car, not all cars. Most families have more than one car, so bikes can enable you to keep one car for those trips where the bike won't work, and be majority bike. (this is important to point out as you don't want people to feel like there is a war on their cars)]

I haven't tried to quantify the health benefits of a bike, but they are there too.