this post was submitted on 17 Dec 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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2024: Hottest year to date, and first year over 1.5ºC (climateandcapitalism.com)
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[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Because living in a world with extreme weather events where you can't leave your house for weeks because of heat waves and never before seen storms, and possibly damage to your home(this has already happened where I live), where a home garden will die to heat waves, with constant shortages of food and water, is not a life I'd wish on my enemy, much less someone I love.

We are already starting to see more extreme heat waves and weather, we know it's happening, and we're drilling for more oil than ever, so the chances the next generation will suddenly start making big changes when the past two have done worse than nothing while being fully informed seems extremely unlikely to me. I'm pretty optimistic on most everything, but there is not a single sign pointing to this being resolved by humans within the next 100 years, if ever.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 days ago

People can adapt, things just aren't bad enough yet to get them to. There's still the illusion many people convince themselves of that everything is fine. When that illusion is incompatible with survival, people will change.

If the weather isn't survivable for long periods, we can build underground shelters. If there are shortages of food and water and home gardens die, we can build storerooms and greenhouses (perhaps underground with artificial lighting) and wastewater recycling. Use wind power (or solar, if the panels can withstand the weather) for electricity to grow the food, recycle as much as you can, and spend any excess labor doing what you can to improve the chances for life on the surface to recover. It sounds terrible compared to our current luxury, but societies have lived (and had kids) through worse.

If you don't want to bring children into a world comparable in quality of life to a 13th century medieval European city, okay. But know that if there is a future, it will be because some people did have children. (Alongside lots of other important reasons).