this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2023
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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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For context, the big oil firms did a series of internal studies back in the late 1970s and early 1980s which accurately anticipated the rise in atmospheric CO2 concentrations and global warming that would result, but went and hired the tobacco-cancer denial machine instead of looking for ways to move the world off fossil fuels.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (1 children)

God that image is depressing

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

@DTFpanda @silence7 here it is in slightly higher res

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago

This makes total sense. California was financially harmed by these oil companies, and they did it knowingly. They should pay for all the damage then.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

The ones in charge during that time deserve to be behind bars, putting their profits before the lives of future generations

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Good for California. I strongly suspect the Supreme Court will throw this out, and even if the oil firms have to pay the cash will disappear into California's corrupt bureaucracy instead of being used for anything useful...

... but people need to know how badly the oil companies betrayed the Earth and the human race in pursuit of profit. They are directly or indirectly responsible for millions, if not billions, of deaths in every country in every continent in the world. They have committed acts of war against every nation on the planet. They have committed not only genocide but ecocide.

And this, if nothing else, gets the message out.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

That's the most recent piece of a big chunk of documents which have come out during earlier lawsuits over the past ten or twelve years. The Drilled Podcast has been chronicling the whole thing in detail.

Paywall-bypass to the WSJ article that The Guardian is describing