this post was submitted on 10 May 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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Carbon Dioxide Just Took an Ominous, Record-Breaking Jump | The world’s gold standard CO2 observatory just experienced its biggest year-over-year increase. (www.bloomberg.com)
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[–] sinkingship@mander.xyz 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I could imagine that el niño can contribute to CO² emmissions indirectly.

Maybe there are in an el niño year more wildfires happening compared to other years for example, which would release additional CO². Or maybe swamps get less water or a combination of several el niño weather effects.

[–] set_secret@lemmy.world 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

This is true only in a climate already above pre industrial age co2 levels. Human activities are what caused it to now amplify the fires etc, which is the positive feedback we're now trapped in (caused by us).

[–] sinkingship@mander.xyz 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

I'm not denying that humanity is responsible for all the climate mess we are in. I'm saying that I can imagine el niño having higher than average CO² releases due to the weather effect it brings looking at a single year, not the climate 30 years.

Of course we humans brought not only ourselves but the vast majority of life into an crisis that seems now to run off. I am very pessimistic about the future as I see still no meaningful reply to this.

Still I find it plausible that in an el niño year there could be more than average CO² emmissions while neutral or la niña years could have less, so they would cancel each other out. If that is so, it would merely be on top of human made emissions, which are still higher than ever.

However, we're probably at a point now where one can't say anything for sure, because no human being has ever experienced 427 ppm CO² and the whole system has an inertia. With this sentence I don't want to say that scientists work not well. I want to say that it is much harder to come to a conclusion to values that have never been seen before compared to data that we can compare with historic data.

Of course that doesn't mean that we can't blame fossil fuel use, because humans emissions are the ones we control most and if we want to continue our lives than we need to stop emmitting.