this post was submitted on 23 Aug 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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What climate policies work best? A new study has answers. Out of 1,500 policies in 41 countries, a small fraction had a big impact. (grist.org)
submitted 2 months ago by silence7@slrpnk.net to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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[–] sping@lemmy.sdf.org 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

From the linked study:

between 1998 and 2022 across 41 countries from six continents [...] total emission reductions between 0.6 billion and 1.8 billion metric tonnes CO2.

Oof, it very much reads like that's total over 24 years, rather than per year. Global emissions being over 37 billion tonnes last year and rising, if my quick googling is to be believed.

a small fraction had a big impact

I wonder what glowing words would be left to describe a hypothetical situation where we were actually making things better, rather than just making them worse fractionally more slowly.

[–] silence7@slrpnk.net 12 points 2 months ago (2 children)

We all know that what has been done hasn't been enough. But knowing which policies do something and which don't is a big deal; it tells us to scale up policies which work to cover more of the world, and not to double down on ineffective approaches

[–] sping@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 2 months ago

It tells us that everything we've done so far is an ineffective approach, and therefore not really a big deal and to do anything useful we need a radical rethink. I think I envy your faith that scaling up our best approaches yet can resolve our predicament, though I'm not quite sure.

[–] mindlesscrollyparrot@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 2 months ago

Although we do still need to keep an open mind. Most approaches take years to roll out. For example, Solar wasn't very efficient in its infancy, but there have been massive improvements since then. Nobody was talking about e-bikes replacing many car journeys; they might not have got anywhere if we hadn't already had big investments in battery and motor technology thanks to e-cars.