this post was submitted on 16 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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This is something everyone should be worried about, and everyone should be angry about, frankly,” NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch coordinator Derek Manzello said.

Derkek might be "shocked" to hear that most people don't care... at all. Well, not enough to change how they Vote or how they act.

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[–] ryannathans@aussie.zone 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

What is the impact of hydro on the local environment? Can you substantiate the impact on fish?

[–] sonori@beehaw.org 2 points 7 months ago

The short answer is that no fish ladder is 100% effective, and part of a river becoming a lake will always change the local ecosystem for better or worse. Both of these things arn’t new, not all fish have ever made it upstream and land slips create new lakes often enough, but they do have an impact.

You’re probably better off looking at one of the few major dam removal projects in California if you want to see the ecological arguments against hydro however, as I don’t think I can make a very good case when I personally think that combating gobal climate change should absolutely take priority over local effects.

Mostly because if we are building renewables as fast as ‘economically practically’ will allow, and we are still using coal and natural gas to generate significant amounts of electricity at any time, then shutting down ang renewable or low carbon generation like hydro or nuclear inherently means that load is being generated by coal and gas at cost of putting hundreds to thousands of metric tons of CO2 and methane into the atmosphere per day said plant is offline.