this post was submitted on 13 Oct 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:

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I Study Climate Change. The Data Is Telling Us Something New. (www.nytimes.com)
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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Net zero is simply where the emissions we still are emitting are being countered by "something" to have a flatline of human sourced emissions total. Likely the same magic that the IPCC is still counting on, carbon removal tech. It's almost 2024 now and we're starting to see the accumulation of the damage we've done, mainly because things like the oceans have hidden it for so long and are now failing. Time is up.

We absolutely need to reduce fossil fuel use NOW, and as much as possible each year. The damage that will do to our society might be a price no one is willing to pay though, we're very heavily dependent on it, more and more each year. Just a linear decrease means in five years we better be down to 30 gigatons annual emissions, and five more down to 20 gigatons. There isn't a way to do that and keep our modern society (and the up and coming third world industrial countries).

Discussing a Catch-22 situation can become heated, because people don't want the problems pointed out to them without some answers to consider. I'm sorry I don't have any to give. Any that I've ever seen or been presented with are always false hopes, it's a big mess we humans have created.