this post was submitted on 14 Oct 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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Global emissions set to peak in 2024 thanks to EVs, clean energy | New research predicts global CO2 emissions will begin to decline this year and halve by 2050. That’s not fast enough (www.canarymedia.com)
submitted 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (6 children)

Given how much energy AI is gobbling up, with no end in sight, I wouldn't take the bet that 2024 is the peak year for CO2 emissions. I'd love to be wrong.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 weeks ago

How much CO2 does AI use compared to other industries? I know it's a horrific use compared to all other software, but have no idea how it factors in global carbon emmissions?

Also, just to be clear, I'm genuinely curious and not defending burning huge amounts of carbon for profit if the AI sector is comparatively small. That kind of backwards "but it just a small amount of everything else" logic would be a great way to accelerate our already too fast death spiral.

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