this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2026
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Climate

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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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Hacking the atmosphere: Geoengineering gets a reality check | Researchers are starting to explore the tools and systems we need to develop to cool down the planet. (www.technologyreview.com)
submitted 4 days ago by silence7@slrpnk.net to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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[–] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 4 points 4 days ago (2 children)

I see a lotmof replies being very negative about this, and I get the gut reaction, but this actually maybe a good thing, sort of. We don't want it, but we may really need it

We've allowed assholes and billionaires to destroy the planet for such a long time that we will likely need measures beyond capturing CO2

Hell, capturing CO2 itself doesn't make much sense until nearly all CO2 generating power sources have been replaced, and we're not nearly close to that. And even when we do start really capturing CO2, if we spend half the world's energy budged in that, we'd still need to keep that up for decades at least to get to acceptable levels. Yes, we've been pumping CO2 into our environment at alarming rates for a fucking long time, and all the energy we got in exchange also needs to be spent (plus a whole lot extra) to get it out of the atmosphere again.

One of the things we can do is using the same pollutants from back in the 80s that caused acidic rain. Obviously this isn't what you want, but one of the side effects nis that it cooled the planet, which IS what we want. This could buy us maybe a few decades of reprieve while we fix the CO2 issue

[–] zd9@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago

Look up termination shock. I worked on SAI (detection and attribution management) for a project for about 6 months, so I know more than the average person on this.

  1. They already do this with marine cloud brightening, which doesn't inject sulfur dioxide high up into the atmosphere, so it's lower risk and more local

  2. This would give a pass to the polluters to continue full speed ahead, but will cause unequal effects across the globe. This will lead to more geopolitical conflict, possibly wars, as one state can cause another to go through a drought and potentially kill millions of people. At the same time, another area can get monsoons and similarly kill a bunch of people. And termination shock will almost certainly cause the entire biosphere on earth to collapse. If SAI is stopped, then that sun energy coming in and interacting with the existing high levels of CO2 will cause all of the negative climate change effects in a matter of months or years, instead of several decades.

[–] HubertManne@piefed.social 2 points 3 days ago

yeah and if poisoning the air more does not help then we can try the water and earth some more. these are just not good even temporary solutions. you hit the nail on the head with we first and foremost have to stop producing greenhouse gases.