this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
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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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We could be 16 years into a methane-fueled 'termination' event significant enough to end an ice age (www.space.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The article was interesting, but remarkably low on numbers - no distribution in percentages, no estimate in mass, no graphs. I'll try to fill the gaps then.

The article assiciated with the last map is here.

Basically, there are various sources of methane on Earth:

  • agriculture (~217 Tg / year)
  • natural wetlands (~181 Tg / year)
  • industry (~111 Tg / year)
  • other natural sources (~37 Tg / year)
  • biomass and biofuel (~30 Tg / year)
  • Arctic permafrost and oceanic hydrates (varies, estimated contribution 0.5 C warming during this century)

My overall conclusion: agriculture is the lowest-hanging fruit, its emissions are the biggest. However, industrial emissions may be easier to regulate since it's more centralized.

[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Most industrial methane emissions are from losses of natural gas. It is pretty closely linked to getting off co2 that way.