this post was submitted on 25 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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Collapse of Earth's main ocean water circulation system is already happening (www.earth.com)
submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

And any other species' chance. Given the expected lifecycle of the Sun that will affect the habitable zone we're in, we have just under a billion years to go before the planet becomes unlivable by anything. Is that enough time for life to start over from some point and try again? Presuming minus a hostile period of time while Earth finds a new environmental balance, which always takes a while.

I think for whatever odds there are out there of other planets that can have the right conditions for life to become intelligent and expand further, they get one shot at it. If there were alien observers they've probably stopped by now. "That went like usual. Got close, but they did the typical mistakes."

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

There's also the argument that developing our civilization was only possible due to easy access to fossil fuels. We've now burnt all the easily accessible ones, so any future civilization won't have them.

We climbed up, burnt the step ladder behind us and are now jumping off the cliff.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

True except for coal, there's a hell of a lot of still accessible coal. Coal is limiting of course and dirty. There's also other resources like metals that we jump started society with that were easily obtained, even picked off the ground, and now are either buried in landfills or merged into alloys that even our technology can't separate or reuse well.