this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2025
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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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There has always been a range of estimates of how much warming we'll get for a given amount of dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. What I think is going on is that as we get closer to the boundaries of maybe-not-crashing-civilization levels of warming, the consequences of reality matching one estimate or another has become salient.

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[–] KnitWit@lemmy.world 14 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Dude, the ice was melting at the North Pole a couple days ago. Real world results show us in all of the fastest tracked models, and just like every year, we released more co2 than we did the year prior. This is why I can’t share the same optimism as people like Dr Michael Mann, why would I take the best case model when humanity exhibits worst case behavior?

[–] P00ptart@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yeah, and with AI and all of these huge data centers, we're raising electrical demands so much that replacing with renewables isn't enough to stop fossil fuels. Not to mention that the effects aren't linear. I.e. as temps go up, it's not just hotter during x amount of days during the warmest days of the year. It pushes more days above freezing. So not only does ice melt faster on days above freezing, but there's also more days above freezing.

[–] faythofdragons@slrpnk.net 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

And our Dear Leader here in the US is gonna approve even more coal power plants, citing AI as justification.

[–] P00ptart@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

Fortunately coal is more expensive than renewables now and most companies see profit above politics. Just like the oil companies who were like "ok... We can drill with impunity, but it doesn't make financial sense because we already have more permits than we need, so we won't be looking for new permits anytime soon". But I'm sure subsidies will be raised to take care of that.