this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2024
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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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One way to get China to clean up faster: build a ‘climate club’ (wapo.st)
submitted 7 months ago by silence7@slrpnk.net to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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The world cannot count on them all to do it on their own. China, in particular, looks likely to fail to deliver on the fairly weak pledges it made in Paris. Fortunately, there is a stick available to encourage ambitions to decarbonize: a tariff based on the carbon embedded in the imports into the United States, the European Union and other rich countries.

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[–] Bartsbigbugbag@lemmy.ml 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Ooh okay thank you, that makes way more sense. I should’ve realized when the numbers were so low.

I think China is on track to reducing their emissions way faster than a lot of places, just in the way they prioritize renewables compared to other places. In the cities I went, at least 80% of cars were electric, and non-car vehicles were almost all electric (scooters, rickshaws etc). I believe countrywide over 40% of cars are electric. Living in the US, that blew my mind.

I think the poverty elimination campaign likely contributed to a rise in emissions, because part of their definition of ending extreme poverty included access to electricity, food, clothing, and medical care, all of which require emissions and in rural areas likely achieved by non-renewable energy. And a lot of China is still rural.

It will be interesting to see how they proceed. If they’re able to help poorer countries develop renewable capacity through their use of economies of scale, such as how their recent production of solar has finally brought costs down to what many global south countries can afford, it might prevent those countries from requiring quite so many emissions to develop and help them skip the dirty phase of development and head directly into clean energy, which would be huge. No one will prevent countries from developing, period, so helping that development be sustainable would be massive in terms of saved emissions over them following the example of the rest of the world to do so.