this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2024
121 points (98.4% liked)

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

5239 readers
576 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: 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:

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

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
top 2 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[โ€“] Pelicanen@sopuli.xyz 18 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Worth noting that this is just solar without grid-scale storage so it can't quite offer the adaptability of coal. PV + storage is closing in fast though so soon it'll be better in all regards.

[โ€“] federalreverse@feddit.de 9 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Almost universally, coal is cheap only because it's subsidized under dubious energy security et al. schemes: besides explicit monetary subsidies, government also helps evict people from the site of your open-cast mine, government makes sure you can sell your energy profitably, government turns a blind eye when you don't meet environmental guidelines, government believes in "Clean Coal" and gives you money for research, ...

Many of the same things are true of other types of energy generation as well, of course.