this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
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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.

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A Texas Dairy Ranks Among the State’s Biggest Methane Emitters. But Don’t Ask the EPA or the State About It (insideclimatenews.org)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Methane is the #2 change we've made to the atmosphere after CO2.

It's worth addressing.

Chart showing temperature change by gas. Methane is #2

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

Methane is a fossil fuel as well.

Emissions from cows are limited by physics to be literally unable to do the damage fossil fuel emissions can. The methane in the ground isn't.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Not really. Methane has the same physical properties no matter what the source. Only difference is when it breaks down, the resulting CO2 for cattle-sourced methane was has a carbon atom which was likely removed from the atmosphere when the plants the cows ate grew. The IPCC agrees:

Methane from fossil fuel sources has slightly higher emissions metric values than those from biogenic sources since it leads to additional fossil CO2 in the atmosphere