this post was submitted on 21 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.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

While I agree that water use for livestock it’s a problem. There aren’t anywhere near a trillion livestock to kill. Over dozens of years, maybe, barely, and a vast vast majority of them are going to be chickens.

In 2014 there were 21 billion chickens. A Trillion is 1000 billion. There were less than 1.5 billion cattle and just over a billion sheep the same year and those numbers don’t appear to change drastically. Pork production is down this year for example.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 weeks ago

Thank you for this! Memory is a fickle thing and I really appreciate you coming in with sources like this.

'Trillion' was such a such a sure figure in my head for annual livestock slaughtered globally and you made me realise that I can't actually remember where I got it from, which is kinda embarrassing.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (1 children)

Oh hang on, that number might of been counting fish/sea animals too? Idk, I still can't remember where I heard 'trillion' on this, but the infographic on Our World In Data could get that number up there with fish included as livestock.

Including fish as livestock is not particularly relevant for making a point on fresh water consumption though, so you were actually still right to call me out on this.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

Yeah it’s easy to exaggerate numbers, I have to catch myself often. Fish could get us close I suppose (shrimp almost surely, but counting each one is problematic).

20 billion chickens is still an insane number anyway. And with so much of the US in drought it’s tough not to let it keep me up at night.