this post was submitted on 04 Sep 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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My takeaways are that more news exposure is good (see the availability heuristic and mere-exposure effect) for putting climate change concern on the agenda, while information campaigns aren't very useful unless they're paired with avenues for action. Policy changes (incentives and disincentives, regulations, price changes, social norms) can help with action.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Scientists are on it. Everybody have HOPE! We can fix it! Carry on eating meat, recycling and having children, and just remember- DON'T LOOK UP! (And pay no attention to the rest of this comment.)

A huge amount of polar ice has melted this year and a massive amount of carbon has been released into the atmosphere from the wildfires , on top of the huge amounts from industrial pollution.

More carbon in the atmosphere means more heat in the next few years.

5 more years as hot as 2023, and we'll have less than 100,000 sq km of polar ice left, the oceans will be absorbing the massive amounts of solar radiation that the ice had previously reflected, and will start releasing massive amounts of methane clathrate from the sea floor. This is called the Blue Ocean Event. And is also known as the Clathrate Gun Hypothesis.

To add to all this terribly offensive fearmongering: There are over 8 billion people on earth and global fresh water reserves will be 40% over capacity by 2030, and 90% of global top soil and arable land is 'at risk' of depletion by 2050. ('At risk' is in quotes to highlight it's a conservative estimate from the UN.)

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If anyone does actually have proper scientific evidence that there is reasonable cause for hope in our ability to 'fix' climate change, I'm all ears and would very much appreciate it, because from where I'm sitting it just looks like if magically the blue ocean event and clathrate gun don't go off and end us first, the drought and famine will shortly after.