this post was submitted on 31 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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This old-school building material could take over city skylines (wapo.st)
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The foundational materials of the past century are energy-intensive and polluting. The production of steel is responsible for 7 to 9 percent of global carbon emissions. The cement industry produces about 8 percent. Efforts are underway to make “green” steel and concrete, but a full transformation is still years away.

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“This is what we have: concrete, steel, masonry and wood. That’s it. And the only path forward to get us to carbon-neutral buildings is timber,” said Green, who designed the seven-story T3 building in Minneapolis, completed in 2016, using timber salvaged from trees killed by beetles.

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[–] Overzeetop@beehaw.org 0 points 1 year ago

I think the better alternative is to not cut down the forests in the first place for either housing or fuel and let them continue to grow. Now for damaged and standing dead trees it makes sense to use them vs burning, but relative to the demand for lumber products, generally, the beetle damaged trees is a small fraction of global supply. Ideally, we’ll stop seeing beetle damage trees, but that would require that we slow down or stop climate change as the beetle problem is one of expanding beetle territory (which the trees can’t move to avoid).