this post was submitted on 03 Sep 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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US squandering billions on unproven climate solutions, critics say (www.motherjones.com)
submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 months ago (2 children)

We are allergic to exploiting great solutions that already exist. Everyone wants to be "disruptive".

It reminds me of the investment that went into hyperloop stuff when our current best transit solutions aren't anywhere close to full saturation in the US. Similarly our current best green technologies are far from being fully exploited.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago

Also, part of the issue is real green technology requires some people to change their business and/or lose some profits. If we do carbon capture or other things, that creates a product to sell. It's a bullshit product that is worse than other options, but if they can it's easier for politicians to sell this to donors than something that'll hurt a very rich industry. Syphon money from taxpayers to make sure the rich dirty energy companies can keep making huge profits and give the tax money to some other rich people to clean up the thing the other guys are doing.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

This is so true!

I think people are so in love with the idea of "innovation" because secretly we all just know that it means "easy-fix" and that sounds a lot better than "hard work".