this post was submitted on 25 Aug 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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That’s really all I’m saying.

The unfortunate truth is that pragmatism sometimes requires choosing between suboptimal options, simply because the long term ramifications of the other options are far worse - even if those other options have better short term outcomes.

It’s all well and good if we can stand on principle and stop the genocide right now… but if the long term ramification is that the genocide starts up again in 3 months with a vengeance, it’s pretty clear that that strategy isn’t the best one. It’s a horrifying thing to have to wrap one’s head around... But it’s basically the trolley problem, writ large.