this post was submitted on 14 Apr 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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Trump Wants to Reverse Coal’s Long Decline. It Won’t be Easy. | Coal has been displaced by cheap and plentiful natural gas and the rapid growth of wind and solar energy (www.nytimes.com)
submitted 6 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago (1 children)

It was invested in coal. Then there were technical improvements which let mine owners replace people with equipment. So coal mining is now a fairly minor source of employment.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

Somewhat related: I recently took a tour through the now-defunct local coal plant. Before 1990, there were 4 teams of 20 people each running this single coal plant.

Right now, just 4×5 people run power generation for the entire city (mostly fossil gas, but also some solar, wind and a large battery), although actually the plants are designed to work safely for 72h without manual intervention.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago

You absolutely shouldn’t do this, but one Japanese operator was caught running a nuclear plant where the only people on the night shift were cleaners, who hadn’t even been told what their radiation badges were. They got a minor fine.