this post was submitted on 26 Jun 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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Biden’s Record Is Full of Climate Wins — So Why Don’t Voters Know It? Environmental groups are making a concerted effort to educate voters about President Joe Biden’s climate policies before election (www.notus.org)
submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago

Humans have limited bandwidth for keeping active "issues" in their brains. We prioritize somethings over others. There has been plenty of press on Biden's climate "wins". But they are irrelevant because he's supporting a genocide.

Say a human can have maybe 5 priorities at a given moment. Anything that drops out of those five priorities means we don't "know" about it (its not at the front of our mind).

For likely Biden independents it goes:

1: Genocide in Gaza

2: Stopping Trump

3: The economy

4: The rise of christian fascism (nationally & globally)

5: The rise of authoritarianism

Climate can't get to the top of the heap because there are other issues, more prescient, are way way way more relevant in near-time. And this has always been the issue with Climate as politics. The costs to doing anything (with time as the x-axis) are always high (on the left side of the x axis, near time) while the benefits are low (in near time). The benefits are all extremely delayed. Humans didn't evolved to deal with this kind of shit. Historically when a population of humans fucked up their environment beyond the point we could survive (its happened a bunch of times), those humans just fucking die and whatever left of their diaspora get picked up by other human populations. We evolved to rank and prioritize issues for survival now, a little bit for 5 years from now, and basically not at all for 20 years from now. And practically 0 for issues 100 years from now.

So its not that people don't know about these W's; its just that they don't care. They can't. They have other shit they need to care about because its blowing up in their faces right now.