this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2025
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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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Carbon capture more costly than switching to renewables, researchers find (techxplore.com)
submitted 6 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

This is unfortunately not true. There are several mechanisms through which meat production increases greenhouse gas emissions:

  1. Bacteria in the stomachs of cattle and other ruminants produce methane, a potent greenhouse gas. So the more cattle being raised for meat or milk, the more methane in the atmosphere. Reduce the size of the herd, and the concentration drops.
  2. Animals consume energy from the food they eat; not every calorie they eat ends up as meat or milk. In the case of cattle, only about 1/10 ends up in that form. So a lot of land needs to be converted from natural ecosystems to produce food for animals. This conversion causes carbon sequestered in trees and soils to be released into the atmosphere.
  3. That increased area of agricultural land needs fertilizer, and the process for making nitrogen fertilizer involves burning huge amounts of natural gas. This both releases CO₂ into the atmosphere, as well as CH₄ via pipeline leaks.

Both of you need to cool it here.

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

those are all problems of production. production doesn't decrease because anybody goes vegan. veganism has been around since the '40s, meat production has only increased since then with a few exceptions that have nothing to do with people being vegan.

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

Almost nobody has gone vegan during a time period where the population affluent enough to afford regular meat on a regular basis has increased many times over.

If a meaningful chunk of the affluent population went vegan, we'd absolutely see a lot less meat produced. At the individual level, it's going to make a very modest difference, but that's how mass changes start.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

At the individual level, it's going to make a very modest difference, but that's how mass changes start.

there's no reason to believe it makes any difference at all.