this post was submitted on 20 Mar 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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[–] TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 25 points 8 months ago (11 children)

This is kind of interesting to me because there are several absolutely a clear mineralogical change that meets this requirement:

But to merit inclusion on the geological scale, any time interval needs to meet certain criteria, such as having a clear, objective starting point in the mineral record.

With maybe the undoubted introduction of plastics into the earths crust as a mineral. Future scientists will absolutely be able to time this change globally because in geological terms, plastics will have been introduced 'everywhere' at about the same time. It will be a distinct marker that can be used to effectively time mass extinctions and a massive change to the atmospheric concentration of CO2.

[–] naeap@sopuli.xyz 6 points 8 months ago (10 children)

Just because I have no clue about the definition:
Does plastic count as a mineral?

[–] merthyr1831@lemmy.world 7 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Mineral => A naturally occurring inorganic solid

So yes it's a mineral, just not the dietary mineral we think of when we consider "vitamins and minerals" (though even then we kinda already absorb loads of it as we do other minerals)

[–] naeap@sopuli.xyz 1 points 8 months ago

Thanks for the explanation!

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