this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2024
60 points (98.4% liked)

Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.

5387 readers
397 users here now

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.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
silence7@slrpnk.net
60
Reality check on technologies to remove carbon dioxide from the air (news.mit.edu)
submitted 3 weeks ago by silence7@slrpnk.net to c/climate@slrpnk.net
15 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] spicystraw@lemmy.world 9 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

But, we do have "technology" for direct carbon capture. Trees and plants. It will consume a lot of valuable real-estate, but we could plant a lot of plant life which would use carbon for growth.

There is just not enough will and to much economy incentives to not terraform earth.

[–] silence7@slrpnk.net 7 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

You can do that, but not at anywhere near the scale of current emissions from fossil fuel burning.

Actually making any kind of removal meaningful means scaling down fossil fuel use to near zero compared with current extraction and burning.

[–] spicystraw@lemmy.world 0 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Agreed, fossil energy sources add more climate gases to the eco balance. I suppose the original idea of "carbon capture" was to capture the excess and store it back under ground.

[–] silence7@slrpnk.net 3 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Or the original idea was to run a PR exercise for the fossil fuels industry, creating social permission to keep on extracting and burning.

[–] houseofleft@slrpnk.net 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Yeah, trees are pretty amazing! There's also a mammoth amount of carbon capture in the ocean (more than land) mostly via plankton but also sea grass and the like.

Trees play a massive role in the ecosystem we're part of aside from just being carbon stores. If we just focus on carbon storage and invent new tech that does that, it might somewhat improve the situation, but we're really just kicking the can down the road, and waiting for our extraction based economy to cause chaos somewhere else.

[–] futatorius@lemm.ee 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Only phytoplankton. Quite a lot of plankton biomass consists of animals and single-celled organisms that don't consume CO2.

[–] houseofleft@slrpnk.net 1 points 3 weeks ago

Amazingly zooplankton does play a huge role in reducing CO2. The ocean carbon pump is a mammoth thing, and it's effects are just from the combined movement of life, not phytoplankton's direct FlCO2 storage.

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