this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2024
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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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I mean one reason methane is worse is because it also becomes co2 but if we got a handle on the co2 we would not be in so problematic a situation. that being said there is about twice as much co2 in the atmosphere as pre-industrially and its at 500 billion metric tons. the cost was 1k per metric ton. a thousand billion is a trillion so it would cost about 250 trillion dollars to get us back to pre-industrial just for co2. if it actually ends up being that cheap. world gdp is estimated at 100 trillion and of course humanity is made of very selfless folks at the wealthiest levels who are way ok with sacrificing their wealth for the good of the planet /s. As you point out that will not get rid of methane or any other pollution we have in the land, water, and air.