this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2023
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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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Large-scale tree planting can remove some CO2 from the atmosphere, but nowhere near as much as humans add by extracting and burning fossil fuels. See https://skepticalscience.com/1-trillion-trees-impact.html for a detailed assessment of what this looks like.

The IPCC has a chart showing what actions need to be taken over the next few years. Afforestation is one piece of many things, all of which we need to do.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

It would take much longer for the trees to become effective carbon capture utilities than the destruction caused by coal mines and fossil fuels the Rs would likely push alongside their newfound climate wisdom.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Hybrid willows and poplars grow about 8ft per year in ideal conditions.