this post was submitted on 05 May 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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Will Shoppers Ever Care About the Destruction of the Planet? Tactics to convince people to buy less aren’t working. A quirky new documentary by Patagonia takes a different approach. (www.nytimes.com)
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[–] spidermanchild@sh.itjust.works 2 points 6 months ago

The problem with using democratic institutions to enact policies that "force people to adapt and be unpopular" is that some large chunk of voters are ill-informed, selfish or at the margins already and do not want to/cannot make any sacrifices. Regulations have to walk a fine line to actually solve problems and not be seen as too disruptive because then you start losing elections and backsliding further.

This is ultimately why the whole "don't blame the individual" trope doesn't make sense to me - if individuals can't stomach any sacrifice at a personal level, can they be trusted to stomach some amount of unknown sacrifice at the polls? Change has to come from the individual and it needs to be a wholesale cultural shift. We can't shift the culture telling people they don't need to do anything except for vote. To be clear I absolutely agree with you on the level of disruption required stop warming and save ecosystems, and I fully support it.