this post was submitted on 26 Nov 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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[–] homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 24 points 3 weeks ago

Science: "I know! . . What if we don't fix the problem!"

Industry: Excellent. You're hired. Have a lot of money.

[–] BlackLaZoR@fedia.io 12 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

There's no serious scientist who believes in direct air carbon capture.

[–] sping@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (2 children)

And yet wasn't it central to the last ipcc report, that we could hold to 1.5C of we stopped all carbon emissions dead and came up with as yet not invented ways for carbon capture. And everyone said "sounds great someone should totally get on that"

[–] thefluffiest@feddit.nl 8 points 3 weeks ago

A bit more subtle than that but it can basically be read like that, yes. That’s the magic of ‘net zero’: overshoot now, find miracle cure later. That religious belief in tech is one of the many reasons why we’re fucked.

[–] theneverfox@pawb.social 5 points 3 weeks ago

More like "carbon capture you say? That sounds like a great reason to stop caring about emissions"

[–] 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

[–] i_am_a_cardboard_box@lemmy.world 6 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Kind reminder that the first solar panels had an efficiency of around 10%, and are now at 22%. The cost of photovoltaics has decreased 60% over the past decade alone.

Of course there is no 'silver bullet'. But the researchers of the original article still recommend working on projects like these.

[–] RvTV95XBeo@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 weeks ago

Projects like this are completely necessary, for after we phase out fossil fuels. Not "while we ramp down" or "so we don't have to shut off this plant over here". Once the phaseout is complete these systems help reign in the overshoot.

[–] futatorius@lemm.ee 1 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Except in this case, the atmosphere is a known (huge) size, the number of points at which capture technology can be applied is not that great, and the more CO2 that's captured, the harder it will be to capture more. And the way gases circulate through the atmosphere, it'll be even harder to ensure that it flows past the places where the scrubbers are located.

Unlike battery tech, none of those factors has a technical solution.

The whole carbon-capture business model is a con. Stop pollution at source, it's the only way that actually works right now. Quit pissing away money, effort and precious time on displacement activities like this and hydrogen.

Nationalize the fossil-fuel companies and start an orderly shutdown. It's the only way we will survive.