this post was submitted on 16 Jan 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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US in deep freeze while much of the world is extra toasty? Yet again, it’s climate change (apnews.com)
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[–] remotelove@lemmy.ca 31 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

It can be super difficult to understand, especially when it's easy to present the same data in multiple ways. Global warming is a thing, and climate change is a thing, but it's hard to fully experience because daily weather is so variable.

For example, if you look at the last 2000 years of data, we are starting an extremely rapid temperature increase. If you zoom out to a the last 500 million years, our global temperature is still changing, but it doesn't appear to be extreme.

People just don't realize that homosapiens only really appeared 200,000 years ago and our distant ancestors started showing up 7 million years ago. Point being, we started evolving in a climate that was cool and then got colder.

For perspective, the first fungi are thought to have first appeared 650 million years ago. They have seen it all and eventually said "fuck this" and now mostly live underground. For good reason.

It's the acceleration of global warming that is bad. In the last few thousand years, we have erased ~25 million years of the last cool down period. That is bad. Very bad.

The earth will survive climate change just fine, maybe. We won't, though.

Disclaimer: All numbers are basic estimates and data changes faster than I can keep up with. I am not a scientist, but I can read charts. For my summary here, I used these:

[–] Telorand@reddthat.com 8 points 9 months ago

All fascinating stuff, even if concerning.

I like this video from Gutsick Gibbon that talks a lot about evolution as it relates/related to climate change and what our future may hold if we don't change.

https://youtu.be/uxTO2w0fbB4?si=bYoBldeh02glM9wR