this post was submitted on 20 Jun 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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Extreme heat should inspire urgency, not doom | On climate change, both denialism and fatalism are mere postures, not serious points of view. (wapo.st)
submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Indeed I see too much fatalistic doomerism here on Lemmy and it's boring - waste of potential energy. We can try to explain better - if people want to understand - that climate system is complex, actions don't give immediately tangible results, there are many sub-systems with inertia, and indeed various types of waves too, but most of this is predictable and the pathways we have to follow are well known.
By the way about the jet-stream waves mentioned in the article, they have two sides - where I am it's been cool recently.
More importantly, seems likely that Chinese emissions are peaking, not because they are so virtuous but because their enormous over-construction bubble involving so much steel and concrete, which was driving global emissions growth, has burst. When I was in climate negotiations years ago, we could never get the chinese to agree to talk about peaking before 2025, yet it happened. Meanwhile renewable energy expands fast around the world.
However we also reduced a lot of sulphate aerosols (both on land and from ships at sea), so we removed that temporary cooling, then on top of that we had El Niño, and have a peak in the solar cycle. The temperature spike then pushes more CO2 into the atmosphere from forests, soils and ocean, so we get bad news about atmospheric CO2, but such feedbacks happened before and are in the models, it’s not unexpected or out of control yet.