this post was submitted on 05 Aug 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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After a Study Found Lead in Tampons, Environmentalists Wonder if Global Metal Pollution Is Worse Than They Previously Thought (insideclimatenews.org)
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[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Isn't the carbon were releasing now from fossil fuels carbon that used to be in the atmosphere? What self reinforcing mechanisms will allow for temperatures roughly beyond what has already occurred, which still sustained life?

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Briefly, they're wrong. I responded in detail above.

You are correct, what we're burning as fossil fuels is largely the remains of millions of years of vegetative and microbial life, altered due to heat, pressure, and time. Millions of years of time.

All that carbon making up those organisms was fixed from the atmosphere. While biological functions have been busy fixing CO2, volcanoes, the Earth's mantle, and even some geochemical processes release CO2. If not for biological fixation, the atmosphere's CO2 content would be higher.