this post was submitted on 29 Dec 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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World will look back at 2023 as year humanity exposed its inability to tackle climate crisis, scientists say (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 18 points 11 months ago (3 children)

A meaningless distinction. Assuming for the sake of argument that there are actions we can take that would solve our predicament, we are unable to persuade the people, governments, and various powers that be to take these actions. That is inability.

To suggest that is not inability reminds me of the joke where the mathematician sees his room on fire, and sees the fire extinguisher, and declares the solution obvious and goes back to sleep. Politics is real.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

The distinction is a meaningful one.

I didn't stop the Holocaust - I couldn't. I wish I could have, but that's not on me. On the other hand, if I was able stop it and chose not to, that'd be evil.

Now scale up from what seems like an extreme example of millions of people to billions of people and a huge chunk of all the life on earth.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

Inability to defeat republiQans then. We can address climate change in 1000 ways. We are able.

It’s not a meaningless distinction, it’s a key distinction. If the headline said “2023 is when republiQans publicly agreed to destroy the planet” it’d have a very different effect. It’s hardly meaningless.