this post was submitted on 24 Jul 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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Methane emissions are the low-hanging fruit of the climate transition (phys.org)
submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Methane (CH4) is the second main greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide (CO2). However, while CO2 will persist in the atmosphere for centuries, methane reacts with other air molecules. The lifetime of methane in the atmosphere is approximately nine years, before it is consumed into CO2. CH4 molecules also have a much stronger warming potential than carbon dioxide: 84 times larger on a 20-year time scale. That's why reducing methane emissions can have immediate and relatively effective impact on our climate.

The European Union (EU) has recently voted unprecedented measures to reduce our emissions, but what is concerned by this law?

What emits methane?

In Europe, emissions are mainly from agriculture (38% in 2022, JRC 2023), through the digestive system of ruminants. (...)

A significant part (globally 30% in 2017 Saunois et al., 2020) of anthropogenic emissions, meaning from human activities, comes from the fossil fuel industry. (...)

In Europe, the majority of methane emissions caused by the fossil fuel industry is from leaks.

Things are starting to change

In 2020, the European Commission announced the creation of the international methane emissions observatory (IMEO). Then, in November 2023, came a series of measures designed to tackle methane emissions from the fossil fuel industry, as part of the "European Green Deal," and passed by a majority vote on 10 April 2024.

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