this post was submitted on 27 Dec 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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Earth Was Due for Another Year of Record Warmth. But This Warm? Scientists are already busy trying to understand whether 2023’s off-the-charts heat is a sign that global warming is accelerating. (www.nytimes.com)
submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago

Yes, but they're trying to figure out if that's where we're at or if this is a temporary blip from the Honga Tonga Honga Ha'apai volcano.

Most volcanoes that size would cool the planet by ejecting a bunch of ash and sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere. But the Tonga volcano was underwater, so it threw a metric shitton of water vapor into the upper atmosphere instead, and this has a warming effect. This is part of the reason for the increase in precipitation on the West Coast of the US this year.

Add this volcano on top of the near simultaneous flip into an El Niño pattern, and they're just not sure how permanent the warming we saw this year is going to be. But any way you go about it, this is really not good. We've just experienced dramatic warming from two things that we can't predict and can't control, on top of the part where we're not doing nearly enough about the things we can control.