this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
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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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Calling this "climate change" is not enough | Journalists and meteorologists must go further, and call rapid hurricane intensification a symptom of fossil fuels. (heated.world)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

That’s really my point though. It is literally true, and we, as scientists, feel a moral obligation to point that out. Journalists similarly feel a moral obligation to find a scientist that will give them a quote they can pull to say exactly that.

And we are tracking things all over the board in terms of storms and intensities and such, but even those articles come with caveats about how we are tracking more storms and fires now and so on. All of that is, again, literally true.

However, the average reader of USA Today isn’t thinking like that. A scientist looking at the data is thinking “Holy crap we are fucked.” They think “I’m sure if it was important scientists and politicians would be saying “Holy crap, we’re fucked!” We are being done in by a crisis of caveats.

And just for the record, I do think we’re fucked. Like, it’s not going to get fixed. To be perfectly honest, my level of investment in the survival of humanity as we know it has decreased to the point of not caring all that much, and I suspect we’re going to see an extinction event that will wipe out a huge number of species. We know how this movie is going to end, and the idea that we can change it is an illusion because that’s just not how people work at the end of the day.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Mom's gonna fix it all soon.