this post was submitted on 27 Dec 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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Earth Was Due for Another Year of Record Warmth. But This Warm? Scientists are already busy trying to understand whether 2023’s off-the-charts heat is a sign that global warming is accelerating. (www.nytimes.com)
submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 17 points 10 months ago

We're on the vertical part of the graph now. CO2 concentrations for the last 800k years. We're fully 25% over the maximum free CO2 over that period. Investments in extraction are still accelerating. Atmospheric methane, while shorter lived, is at the highest we've ever seen.

Climate averages are based on 30 year moving averages, generally. But there's every reason to believe we're into the hockey stick now. You can't simply put away atmospheric carbon that took geologic processes millions of years to sequester and we're not even slowing down. Even while regenerable sources take up a larger proportion of power generation, we're not drawing down the bad sources. We're just increasing our capacity for power consumption.