this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2024
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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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For at least 70 years, the fossil fuel industry has been aware of — and, in fact, funded — research showing that their products would cause climate crises and global warming, newly uncovered documents have revealed.

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[–] [email protected] 42 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Sweet. Fine them for 70 years of knowingly contributing to air pollution and climate damage.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 9 months ago (1 children)

We can't do that; it might harm The Economy. Best we can do is a stern scolding and a gentleman's agreement to not do it again.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

That works.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I just learned about Eunice Foote yesterday. We've known about it since 1856!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunice_Newton_Foote

[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Kind of.

John Tyndalls independent discoveries in 1859 generally laid out the concept of the greenhouse effect - how these substances can create a cycle that lead to increasing temperatures. This was built on understandings of works nearly a hundred years earlier around how the sun and atmosphere propagate heat.

Eunice’s works work was more that an atmosphere made up of this gas would be hotter than our present.

Basically her discoveries fell to obscurity and are more of an interesting historical footnote. Tyndalls directly lead to what we know today and is part of an evolutionary chain of understanding.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Kind of. The first person to work this stuff out was actually Joseph Fourier in 1822

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

Gotta love the shoulders of giants.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago

The person who was in charge in 1954 probably died super wealthy sometime in the 70s-80s. In that regard he correctly judged this to be a problem for future generations. We may think that it was selfish to burn his grandchildren's future for his present comfort, but most of us are not sociopaths.