this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2026
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Climate

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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:

Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.

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[–] tunetardis@piefed.ca 15 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

This is the crux of it, and not enough emphasis is placed on this. It is the unprecedented rate of warming more than the total amount that is of greatest concern if you've studied any paleoclimatology and seen how long it takes for natural systems to re-establish in a new climate regime.

There has been a lot of study on how the transition to the current interglacial climate affected the biogeography, and you can see how forests, coral reefs, etc. were still trying to relocate several thousands of years into it. Now, of course, they're screwed, and we have mass forest fires and the like because they have no hope of adapting anymore.