this post was submitted on 20 Nov 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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Exotic Powder Pulls Carbon Dioxide from the Air at a Record Rate (www.scientificamerican.com)
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[–] [email protected] 39 points 3 days ago

Methane is much more potent (over 100x), but there's still relatively more damage by CO2 thanks to a higher atmospheric abundance, and methane is able to break down much more quickly in the atmosphere. It's far worse per molecule, but CO2 is far worse overall.

Methane is a massive problem, and there should be more focus on it, but bringing it up on an article about CO2 emissions instead of engaging with the problem described in the article is the sort of textbook whataboutism that people who want to stall climate action use because "well what about this other thing instead" (repeat ad infinitum until the planet's uninhabitable). Anyone is welcome to post on Lemmy, and that makes you more than welcome to make separate posts for articles on methane.

And this is coming from someone who ardently opposes animal agriculture and natural gas, two of the biggest sources of atmospheric CH4.