this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2024
101 points (99.0% liked)

Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.

5246 readers
503 users here now

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.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

What this means in practice is that we enter a minefield where we start to lose major ecosystems as temperatures continue to rise.

This makes it incredibly important to do everything we can to limit the amount of additional warming we see; each 1/10 of a degree adds to the risk.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Cethin@lemmy.zip 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Sadly, this will probably not make humans extinct. It'll kill a lot of people and make life worse for even more, but some humans will survive. It's a question of how much damage it does to the planet. I guess we could end up in a venus situation, but that's probably unlikely. I'm not sure what'd have to happen to get to that point.

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 3 points 10 months ago

It would be interesting to see any detailed analyses on what is likely to persist in terms of human civilisation.

I’ve just consigned the whole idea to something more or less like the world wars where everyone afterward will wonder “what the fuck happened” but eventually accept their fate (humans are good at being slowly boiled unfortunately). To some extent there will be some memory of what was and why it was lost, but I suspect it’s unpredictable how that gets culturally encoded.