this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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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:

Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

What you're missing is that the CFC ban, and environmental regulations to stop acid rain, and similar government actions in the '80s and '90s, hurt profits. And businesses learned from that.

Big Oil especially saw the writing on the wall. It knew global warming was real and environmentalists were going to come after CO2. So they brought together teams of PR experts and MBAs, they consulted with tobacco lobbyists who fought government regulation for decades, and asked them "how can we prevent governments from regulating fossil fuels before they start?"

And the answer was "make environmental science partisan, get one political party on our side, and as long as you can keep a bipartisan consensus from forming you can keep government from doing anything effective".

And it's been stunningly effective.

Frankly, if the link between smoking and lung cancer was only identified today, there's absolutely zero chance smoking would be banned or regulated nationwide. Tobacco industry lobbyists would be funding pro-smoking public service announcements as aggressively as the dairy industry does milk ads. Republican politicians would hand out cigars at rallies. Tucker Carlson would have whole shows dedicated to the idea that vaccines cause lung cancer. Every newspaper opinion piece saying smoking is harmful would be countered by another opinion piece saying the science isn't settled and we can't take away American's freedom based on uncertain science. Conservatives would be chain smoking to own the libs. Yeah, individual blue cities and blue states might be able to regulate smoking. But half the country would believe the link between smoking and lung cancer was invented by communists to steal Americans' freedoms. And no effective collective response would be possible.

The difference between the '80s and today is corporate America is much better at controlling the political narrative to prevent collective action. And without collective action we can't do shit.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

The US has milk ads ... in traditional media? Strange.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Well said. Nothing corrodes my hopes and dreams like the responses to coronavirus and Sandy Hook. The Merchants of Doubt have been busy.