Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.

5239 readers

582 users here now

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:

Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

silence7@slrpnk.net

China’s Surge in Solar and Hydro Point to Early Carbon Peak (finance.yahoo.com)

submitted 5 months ago by silence7@slrpnk.net to c/climate@slrpnk.net

10 comments fedilink hide all child comments

all 12 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] MrMakabar@slrpnk.net 8 points 5 months ago

Chinas economy has problems, the population is falling and they do have a massive built up of green technologies. That are important factors for a fast change in emissions. Given that China is producing about 30% of global emissions, this is really great news. Lets hope countries like India do not make up for the drop.

[–] jupyter_rain@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 5 months ago

My hopes are high that China can do this. They still seem to need a better grid, like most countries, so I am curious how they will solve this.

[+] downpunxx@fedia.io -11 points 5 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

[deleted]

[–] MrMakabar@slrpnk.net 12 points 5 months ago

We can verify a lot of that. There are satellites in space measuring emissions and they are good enough to get data for individual power plants.

[–] TheIvoryTower@lemmy.world 9 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Fuck China, but when it comes to carbon emissions, they could burn coal for another 50 years and still not be as bad as the united states.

[–] silence7@slrpnk.net 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

That's not true at all; they're burning more than the US is now, by a fair bit. The US has a lot of historical cumulative emissions, but China is close to overtaking those.

[–] TheIvoryTower@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

That's exactly what I mean.

More importantly, the per capita rate for the US (and Australia and Canada etc) is far worse. You may hate the chinese government, but can you explain to me why Chinese people dont have the right to drive cars and run refrigerators, but people in the US do?

[–] red@sopuli.xyz 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

What the hell are you saying? This has to be a joke.

[–] TheIvoryTower@lemmy.world 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

No joke. What exactly don't you understand?

People in the US have been burning carbon at an extraordinary rate since the Industrial Revolution, in the 1900s.

Still to this day they burn carbon at a rate of 14.44 tonnes per person per year.

Chinese people burn 8.85 tonnes per person per year.

They burn that carbon running cars, generating electicity, living their lives.

If we are measuring how much CO2 countries have contributed, China has decades of shitty energy production up on the US. They may be a ruthless authoritarian communist state, but they are the not the ones responsible for climate change.

Also, half of the emissions they create are producing your cheap plastic crap to be bought on Amazon

[–] red@sopuli.xyz 1 points 4 months ago

The part where you said Chinese people don't have refrigerators and aren't allowed to drive cars.

[–] MrMakabar@slrpnk.net 0 points 4 months ago

China emits nearly twice as much as the US these days. At this rate China is overtaking the US in 25 years or so. Probably sooner as US emissions are dropping, whereas Chinas emissions are increasing.

Obviously Chinas per capita emissions are below the US, but they are still nearly twice the global ones and above those of the EU or UK for example. When you look at cumulative per capita emissions China is about averge. However that includes a lot of emissions from dead people and for China those are nearly zero. If you only look at cumulative emissions since 1990 China is about as bad as the EU on a per capita bases. However with 30% of annual emissions.

So please do not pretend that China is not responsible for climate change. They absolutly are.