this post was submitted on 03 Nov 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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[–] sonori@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It could happen quickly, in theory. Energy also could have been largely decarbonised by 2010, in theory. France accidentally decarbonized most of thier grid in the 70s after all, and we’ve had scientific consensus that it needed to be done urgently since about then aswell. Better panels, heat pumps, and batteries help, but we’re never necessarily. Instead, we built massive numbers of brand new coal plants and we have since added far more carbon to the atmosphere knowingly in the last fifty years than we had in all of human history before that.

There is no magic here, China for all its fault is set up to produce enough solar panels next year to power the entire US grid, and do so every year thereafter for decades to come. Electric cars make up over seventy percent of new car purchases in Norway. There is no magic reason the US and Canada couldn’t have done the same.

Companies like Shell and BP can’t exsist in 30 years, at least not as anything larger than a specialty lubricant supplier, and they know it. They also know that thier jobs depend on the company growing, no matter the cost. They will spend whatever it takes for each delay, each legal battle, massively fund any hate group, take as many politicians to fancy dinners where they lie their asses off about a green transition, so long as it buys just one more day of profits.