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.

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US House Republicans propose planting a trillion trees as they move away from climate change denial (apnews.com)
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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] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I always thought we should plant hybrid poplar or maybe empress trees. Then coppice and turn the wood to biochar.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coppicing

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar

You can do it multiple times and take cuttings to grow new trees. I dont know how much land a pig farm needs, but if it's like chicken factories, they basically live in cramped spaces. So you can dump the biochar into the pig shit. Let it soak up the nutrients and then fertilize the stumps.

The biochar is now stable carbon that will be sequestered in the ground for hundreds of years

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I have been planting hybrid poplars and willows for three years. I'm bad at it, and lazy. So I basically just walk out to the semi-swamp behind my house and push sticks in the ground. I now have about 15 trees, 8ft to 26ft, and I'm slowly turning my backyard into a shady alcove.

Unfortunately the hybrid poplar only lives for 30 years, but you can plant longer living trees (maples, pines, oaks) while the initial batch is growing. Then bury the wood of the poplars to sequester the carbon.