this post was submitted on 09 Aug 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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[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

it depends on whether that tree is re-planted.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Its not that simple sadly, saplings and young trees capture significantly less than older mature trees. We're talking a 30+ year return on that carbon investment. Planting trees and restoring wilderness for carbon capture and sustainable ecosystems is good, ripping them up every 20 to 40 years for biofuels is not. If your end goal is sustainable energy, nuclear, wind or even solar would be better use of that space and still probably have land left over for forestey renewal. The reason nuclear is the ecologically best choice is because it uses the least amount of land per kwh produced, leaving more land that can be used for conservation and long term carbon capture efforts.