this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2024
49 points (72.9% liked)

Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.

5276 readers
711 users here now

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:

Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

My mum never owned a car, we walked, biked, bus'd or train'd every day of my life. Because I was used to it and don't have a lot of money, I don't own a car either. I don't know what exactly you want me to do to give them less money, but what I do know is me walking everywhere every day has influenced exactly 0 people to do the same, and it's affected global carbon emissions by such a small fraction it can barely be measured.

It's not relatively small, it's essentially non existent, and there's no way as an individual to force others to give up their conveniences, any more than an individual can have the government ban all fossil fuels.

How much profit do you possibly think Australia provides to BP and other companies? How much of Australia doing business with them contributes to their global emissions? Because the fact is the entirety of Australia could return to tribalism with no modern technology and it would barely move the needle on either global profits or global emissions. Even a country that has 5% global emissions wouldn't achieve much by going to 0. It's near meaningless.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

You're arguing that the actions of individuals have no impact on the collective actions of humanity, the sum of 8 billion individuals.

Similarly, you probably never had a conversation where someone said "Gee, I'll stop burning fossil fuels now!" But when you use public transportation, or patronize businesses on foot, policy makers are motivated to continue supporting such options. Not for you personally, but for you and others like you.