this post was submitted on 11 Aug 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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U.S. to Fund a $1.2 Billion Effort to Vacuum Greenhouse Gases From the Sky | Many scientists are skeptical of the technology, and environmentalists have criticized the approach. (www.nytimes.com)
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[–] schroedingershat 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The problem is there's a few hundred billion tonnes or so that needs removing and it can't go from 0 to billions of tonnes per year overnight, but as soon as you start doing it publicly propagandists will flock to it and use it to delay more effective and pressing action.

[–] vanderstilt 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Mitigating ongoing emissions is cheaper than removing well mixed past emissions.

[–] schroedingershat 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Again. The machine needs to be in place a few years after all the low hanging fruit are picked in terms of new emissions (which is hopefully about 10 years away at the current pace of decarbonization technologies). But any public action on building the industrial base will be coopted to cause a delay. It's a hard problem with no easy answer and one that needs to be worked on soon.

I hope this means someone sensible in one of the well funded militaries has thought about it and is building the required infrastructure to the scale of hundreds of millions of tonnes in secret so it can quickly scale to billions, but this seems like a stretch given who controls their purses.