this post was submitted on 14 Nov 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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How Climate Change Misinformation and Apathy Helped Trump Win (sentientmedia.org)
submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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The Bottom Line

Despite widespread consensus on the reality of climate change, misinformation about both the causes and solutions for climate change took hold during the 2024 presidential election. As this type of misinformation continues to impact public discourse, the need for greater media literacy becomes crucial, particularly to counteract the influence of political leaders and foreign-backed campaigns on voter behavior.

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

Part of what they are saying is that they distrust mainstream media sources. Which if I were to rephrase as the for-profit media that aims to maximize engagement regardless of the long-term effects upon the user, would that help it become more understandable? The media lies, some portions of it more than others, and even when it tells the truth it does so in a manner that is highly skewed towards maximizing their profits.

And then the whole "people say" gets even worse, because who vets those people? During the pandemic, literal doctors were prescribing Ivermectin and telling people to avoid the vaccine, and there was a huge conspiracy theory about Dr. Fauci.

Normal people can't understand the science on their own, are too busy with their lives to learn, and also they simply don't want to. But they're not entirely wrong - you really can't trust what "people say" (e.g. they also say to buy crypto) - and that germ of truth is what helped sell the lie.

i.e. the disinformation peddlers were quite strategic in predating upon our weaknesses, where "news" would do things like talk about Donald Trump nonstop, which gave him millions of dollars of free publicity, and helped him get elected (the first time I mean, but probably also the second).

So "we" are not blameless here either, if we turn a blind eye to the faults on one side and simply would rather blame "the other side" as if that were all that were needed to explain the entirety of the situation. That is a comforting lie, an "alternative fact" if you will. I may not have explained this well, but I hope you see what I was trying to say.