this post was submitted on 10 Apr 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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“There’s no ambiguity about the data,” said Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist and the director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “So really, it’s a question of attribution.”

Understanding what specific physical processes are behind these temperature records will help scientists improve their climate models and better predict temperatures in the future.

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[–] Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social 12 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I thought we figured out that it was removing sulfur from ships' fuel that caused less cloud coverage over the ocean which warmed it.

The good news is that now that we know the scale of the effect we can do something similar with non-toxic chemicals and help to mitigate climate change.

[–] silence7@slrpnk.net 16 points 7 months ago (2 children)

That's part, but not enough to explain what we're seeing, unless we've been significantly wrong about how impactful greenhouse gases and aerosols are.

[–] Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social 6 points 7 months ago

Thanks for the additional info!

[–] metaStatic@kbin.social 4 points 7 months ago

Science suffers from a bias towards elegant explanations, maybe it's just a fucking mess and we're not going to find that one single thing to blame it on.