this post was submitted on 18 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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Unintended warming: How reduced ship [sulfate aerosol] emissions may accelerate climate change (cpo.noaa.gov)
submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 43 points 2 months ago (1 children)

No, these emissions masked climate change. Reducing them didn’t accelerate it, the warming effect was already there.

It’s headlines like this that subtly mislead people

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

That sounds analogous to the withdrawal effect which addicts suffer when stopping drugs.

Quickly reducing pollution reduces the short-lived masking effect, which makes things temporarily worse when the pollution stops. It's still worth it and the best option long term.