this post was submitted on 08 Mar 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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The case for scrubbing the seas to save the climate | We can extract CO2 from the ocean. Can it turn into a business? (www.vox.com)
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[โ€“] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

True, and until every power generation possible has been changed to non CO2 emissions it's not only less efficient, the CO2 extraction would actually end up adding CO2 because of what you said

Having said that, at some point when we do have everything running on carbon neutral, we still have the issue of CO2 levels being well over twice as high

THAT is the moment we need to star scrubbing, it will be a necessity because the world can't handle this by itself (at least not for millennia)

[โ€“] Tiresia@slrpnk.net 3 points 1 day ago

We already have countries where there are so many solar panels that the price of electricity goes negative on summer afternoons. Even if we build enough storage to carry that energy from afternoon to night, it's simply unfeasible to have enough storage to carry that energy from summer to winter.

So in the process of getting carbon-neutral in winter, we're going to have a massive amount of excess electricity in summer. We need some industry to spend all that free electicity, so why not carbon capture tech?

That's not a rhetorical question - any industry that is better than carbon capture tech will do - but right now the most likely claimants are terrible options like AI data centers or designing buildings to have less natural cooling and more air conditioning. And if we're going to use carbon capture tech at some point, better we have some small-scale experiments before that to work the kinks out.