this post was submitted on 18 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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To be clear: there's a night-and-day difference between Biden and Trump, with the former having actually taking significant action, and being likely to take more if reelected. Trump will look to maximize both extraction and consumption of fossil fuels in a way that Biden simply didn't and won't.

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[–] blindsight@beehaw.org 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

All true. But the unfortunate political realities the Democrats are facing seem to be that voters just don't care enough so it's political suicide to take strong action against climate change.

If voters actually cared about climate change, then it would be a major part of the platform. But there's a huge swath of the population that only cares insofar as it doesn't inconvenience them, or who have been brainwashed into believing it's a "Leftist Conspiracy" while completely missing that the QAnon memes they got their "facts" from is literally a conspiracy.

We're fucked. Biden doesn't have the political strength to take any political risks. We're seeing the same in Canada, with Trudeau not having the political capital for anything that could lose ground to the Canadian Conservative Party (which is currently polling as over 99% likely to get a majority government if there's no change in the next 1½ years).

I don't know how we can de-radicalize the Christofascist Right, but we're fucked until we figure it out.