this post was submitted on 01 Aug 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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Why Is the Oil Industry Still Thriving? (www.splinter.com)
submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago (4 children)

We're still using fossil fuels, and not phasing out as fast as possible.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Doing it as fast as possible would crash the world economy because everything is setup up for oil. So it seems obvious what needs to happen, it’s a different story when you personally are now homeless and you just want a roof and food. We can do a lot better than we are though

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

The alternative, parts of the world will be uninhabitable. Always gotta think about the economy... no matter how many people this is going to kill, or how much biodiversity we lose along the way.

Is there any point of loss where we will say the economy isn't important anymore, or do we have to be experiencing the loss already?

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The problem is crashing the economy will kill a lot of people right now, no need to wait or come up with a better solution

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

If you look at it on a case-by-case basis, it's harder to catastrophize. Would the world economy collapse if petroleum-derived food additives vanished? No. Plastic bags? No. The vast volumes of cheap plastic packaging? No. Shipping? That'll take a while. Fertilizers? Partial substitution can happen immediately, but a full changeover will take years. And so on through the list. You can rack and stack each case by its social value, how hard it will be to eliminate or replace, and the lead time needed to transition. Beyond that it's engineering, planning and politics.