this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2024
40 points (100.0% liked)

Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.

5100 readers
410 users here now

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:

Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
top 1 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

The article touched on pretty much every anecdotal point I could possibly make. About 10 years ago, the decades-long pattern of "it's hot and humid today, might get a thunderstorm in the afternoon or early evening" turned to "flash flood deluge for 20 minutes 3-4 times a week." 3-4 years ago, we started adding droughts into the mix. Weeks without a single drop of rain, then an inch or two of water dumped in minutes. This past month was a pretty good snapshot of the general pattern:

In aggregate it cheekily masks as "about average," but the majority of those downbursts just run off and the ground is baked back to dust a few days later.

Meanwhile, the humidity/dew point has been rising steadily, especially overnight. Clear nights that allowed daytime heat to radiate off became less common, in its place we now get weeks at a time where the temperature doesn't drop below 70 at near-saturation. I was watching one of the PBS YouTube channels (Terra, maybe) a year or so ago and they showed a time lapse of ocean surface temperature changes. Sure enough, there was a hot spot off the coast of NJ. "Well, that tracks. 😑"

I noticed the trees started dropping leaves in mid-August a few years ago despite it being warm into October. Spring and fall are shrinking, with precious few weeks in the year where neither the heat nor the AC need to run.

People like to dunk on Florida because of the politics, and NJ because of the stereotypes. Both are in deep shit right now. The entirety of South Jersey is considered coastal plain, and a lot of the land around NYC is low elevation. The next few decades will not be pretty.