this post was submitted on 10 Jul 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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Can humanity address climate change without believing it? Medical history suggests it is possible (theconversation.com)
submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I don't quite follow the medical analogy used, since only the mechanism was in dispute and not the fact that people were getting sick. If it was directly analogous, people would have been denying that sickness happened at all, just like how there are far too many people who don't believe that climate change is happening.

However, I agree with the gist: it won't happen on a broad scale until it's more profitable to keep humanity alive than continue killing it. The current generation of c-level officers is old enough that they won't live to see the effects of their greed, but the next generations will, and you can't make money if you're constantly fighting the weather or your workforce is dying of heat stroke.

It may be too little too late by that point, since there's a lot of biological systems that are negatively affected by climate change, but I don't doubt that profit will be a big motivator.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

If it was directly analogous, people would have been denying that sickness happened at all, just like how there are far too many people who don't believe that climate change is happening.

I don't know that this is necessarily true - I can't speak to everyone, and there's always crazies who take things to the extremes, but most deniers I'm aware of don't deny that the climate is changing, they deny that it's caused by humans, and they doubt the forecasts.

I think we're, to a certain degree, past the days of bringing a snowball onto the Senate floor to disprove climate change, and into the "humans aren't doing this, the planet just goes through phases" denial, which is to a certain degree similar to people denying germ theory insisting instead it's just demons / God's will.

People are finally seeing and experiencing the record setting heat waves, polar vorteces, unprecedentedly early Cat 5 hurricanes, and rising sea levels, they just refuse to accept fault, or agree that it's worth sacrificing "the Economy" to try and stop it from getting worse.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Those optimistic takes on climate are getting out of hand.