this post was submitted on 12 May 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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[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 1 points 6 months ago

Upvoting, since while I do not agree (though I haven't kept up with their latest videos, e.g. damn do they really advocate for leaving Earth behind? I never saw that but in that case, I would agree with you that's not great - though just b/c they have videos about aliens doesn't mean that they are advocating that as their solution? can you send me any examples to look at?), in any case I do thank you for explaining your POV.

Fwiw, I do see that Kurzgesagt's newer videos do have a "forced" optimism injected into them that their older ones did not - example. As you see, it wasn't even that they were "all doom & gloom", they were simply factual & even slightly positive, but they were not positive enough, so people complained and stopped watching them for that reason, therefore this was their response. Here is where we could argue that capitalism won... but they do exist in a capitalist society, and had to find a way to move forward, and anyway I actually don't think that's it (though I have no direct proof here).

As that famous saying goes, there is a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.

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I think they opted for the latter (walking the path), so as to have at least some hope of reaching people. And it worked!?! In the sense of solving that immediate issue of concern, i.e. at least they made really fantastic videos. If someone could not understand their 5-minute blurb of e.g. the vaccination process (What Actually Happens When You Are Sick?, then as the premise of how this whole conversation string started, they really aren't listening and won't hear no matter how simply it is explained. This is a service that they provided, b/c it needed to have been at least tried before abandoning all hope from that path.

Mind you, that path overall may have failed, but we cannot say that it was from lack of trying, in large part b/c of Kurzgesagt's videos - free, easy to watch, funny cartoonish graphics make them pleasant to look, they are nicely paced, have great voice-overs, etc. Most importantly, anyone from a child to an octogenarian could handle 10 minutes of that, even if they have to pause and rewind, or watch many times, etc. - if they really did want to know, such a video leaves no excuses to not knowing after having watched it.

Keep in mind that Kurzgesagt's goal wasn't to solve the problem - their goal was to educate the general populace, which I don't know if they accomplished, but they did at least make the videos.

Similarly it is up to scientists to monitor - which they likewise are doing - and for governments to enact policy change and... shit, yeah that's where it all breaks, isn't it?:-P But Kurzgesagt at least did their part admirably, imho (I dunno about scientists, I cannot judge there but even if not, that would be in large measure up to funding which gets back to governments).

So, if our governments or even humanity itself deserves to survive, it's up to our next steps to make it happen... or not, whatever. But, and here's where I finally start to diverge from what you said, after you make a "diagnosis", the next step is to do something about it. Simply stating that we should not compromise with capitalists makes sense... so then what do we do?