this post was submitted on 24 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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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

They won't, but talking with your neighbors, building consensus, and changing the rules of society might.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Yes. The answer I expect. Has it worked until now?

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

It's still in the "concept of a plan" phase

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Politics tends to not work and not work and suddenly work once you have sufficient power.

In the US:

  • There were occasional quiet warnings of the problem to politicians starting in the 1950s.
  • In the 1980s we got to the point of being able to get testimony in front of congress, but didn't have a single vote for action
  • In the 1990s, we had only a handful of politicians who would be willing to vote for any kind of meaningful action
  • In the 2000s we had legislation pass the house, but die in Senate because there were only ~40/100 votes in favor there
  • In 2021 we actually got carrots-only legislation passed into law

We're not where we need to be yet, but it's clear that you can actually get something that way.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

I'm not American myself. But have you watched the movie "don't look up" ? It's about a huge world wide threat, in the form of a comet, that will kill everyone. Politics (in an absurdist way) make it impossible to do something against the threat.

It's a worldwide problem. People actively lobbying against climate laws are criminals and should be treated like it. People need to be educated and activated to fight it. That hasn't happened yet. The damage is done.

You see. Temperature and climate aren't the things that'll kill us. We can adapt to almost anything as long as we agree to do it together. Even if its not "economically viable". We have reached space and built towers higher than the clouds, for crying out loud.

But ecosystems in general will not adapt, at all. So realise that, if we succeed to change the course of this climate change, the ecosystems that are collapsing already will not magically fix themselves. In fact, they'll still probably collapse. We are part of these systems too.

I would love to be positive about the small victories, but we are going to see some very hard to process changes in the coming years. It will get worse before anything will get better.