this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2023
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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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Occidential Petroleum Quietly Ditched the World’s Biggest Carbon Capture Plant | The plant never operated at more than a third of its capacity in the 13 years it’s been running (www.bloomberg.com)
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[–] kozy138@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

"Temporarily lock up carbon while they're alive" So.... only for a few thousand years then....

We can do both. Plant trees, and replace turf grass with native grass and flowers.

[–] conditional_soup@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Very, very few trees live that long in practice. The average tree lifespan is three to four hundred years, though there are plenty of species that are sub-100 on average. But that's not the point. The point is that you're just cycling the carbon, not really removing it from circulation. The instant there's a devastating forest fire or something causes those trees to die, that carbon is back in play. Even if the trees don't all die at once, you're still going to hit an equilibrium where the number of trees dying of natural causes and releasing carbon balances the number of trees growing and locking up carbon. It's not the worst stop-gap solution (that honor belongs to industrial carbon capture facilities) to buy ourselves some more time, and we SHOULD be planting more trees, but it's not a good solution for permanently reducing our carbon load.