this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2025
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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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The utterly plausible case that climate change makes London much colder | For some climate scientists, global warming threatens Britain with a more unexpected scenario (www.ft.com)
submitted 7 hours ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

Europe gets it warm climate (relative to how northerly much of it is) because of ocean currents transporting heat from the south. Climate change might cause these currents to change and one of the ways it could change is a shutdown of the currents that bring the heat. This would cause the climate of Europe to become more like northern Canada with a lot of ice, ultra cold winters and moderate summers.

HOWEVER, it is far from certain this would or even could happen. Ocean currents are a pretty complex and chaotic (in a math sense of the word) system. Predicting what effect climate change has is very very hard. It will probably have an effect for sure, but what that effect is would be hard to say. Even a shutdown of the amoc could mean a new current system replaces it and who knows how that system functions.

Especially for a place like London which isn't on the ocean but on the North Sea, it's hard to predict what would happen. If the ocean currents cause the climate around the UK and Europe to become colder, London could still get a lot of warm water coming in from the south in the North Sea and still have a moderate climate.

We should be very scared of climate change. If you think about how much energy you need to put into the ocean to even heat it up a little bit, it's too much to fathom. But we did heat it up, by a lot. However these kinds of speculations aren't really helpful. At best it scares people who are scared to begin with, at worst it has climate deniers tell people akshually the world will become colder not warmer.