this post was submitted on 07 Dec 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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A ‘Green Glacier’ Is Dismantling the Great Plains (www.nytimes.com)
submitted 11 months ago by silence7@slrpnk.net to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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Thanks in part to roughly 100 years of fire suppression on the Great Plains, this drought-tolerant native tree [eastern red cedar] — once primarily confined to river bottoms and rocky outcrops — has crept from the gullies to the grasslands, from the humid East to the arid West from Texas to South Dakota, and is now dismantling what little remains of one of the most endangered ecosystems in the world.

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[–] jadero@slrpnk.net 2 points 11 months ago

Grasslands are also carbon sinks. I don't know off hand whether grasslands are inferior to forest in the regard.

However, there is more to environmentalism than carbon. I live in Southern Saskatchewan. To a very close approximation, the only trees you can see have been either planted by settlers or are descended from trees planted by settlers. Before Europeans (and maybe even before the arrival of the peoples who preceded Europeans), the natural ecosystem in very large regions of the central plains of North America was a mostly treeless landscape with untold numbers of flora and fauna never found in forested areas.

My understanding is that even natural grassland wildfires were enough to keep trees from gaining a foothold. Higher populations of grazing megafauna may also have played a role.