this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2024
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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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This Scientist Wants to Block the Sun to Cool the Earth (www.nytimes.com)
submitted 3 months ago by silence7@slrpnk.net to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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In addition to actual reporting, the NYT creates newslike ads for the fossil fuels industry. This results in disproportionate attention on high-risk approaches that involve anything other than phasing out fossil fuel use.

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[–] rtxn@lemmy.world 4 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Tell me, does it fail catastrophically?

[–] silence7@slrpnk.net 23 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

There are a bunch of issues:

  • It requires maintaining technical infrastructure for longer than civilizations last
  • It changes the pole-to-equator temperature gradient, altering weather patterns worldwide
  • It changes rainfall distribution in ways that we're not clear on yet, potentially risking agriculture
  • If we keep on burning fossil fuels but limiting temperature increase with a scheme like this, we still end up with ocean acidification, killing off pretty much everything with hard body parts in the oceans
[–] Tiresia@slrpnk.net 1 points 3 months ago

If you let a sabretooth tiger loose into a playground full of unsuspecting children in order to catch the rats that are eating all the shrubs, does it fail catastrophically? Or was it just catastrophic to begin with?

In the struggle against human-caused climate change, this is a completely new avenue for humans to change the climate.