this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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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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[–] Polydextrous@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

EXACTLY. The personal carbon footprint thing was literally made up by oil industry publicists. It wasn’t part of the discussion, the blame was being laid squarely at the feet of the companies who were destroying the earth for a buck. But lo and behold, here come the publicists and the entire environmentalist movement got caught in the trap.

Hold companies responsible. Do your own thing that makes you feel better, but even if everyone in this comment section went full-on vegan, we wouldn’t put the tiniest dent in the emissions of one individual company—and not even a big company, like, a small-to-medium sized company.

Think about your grocery store. How many people that shop at that one store would have to go vegetarian before they changed their order? And how many stores would have to change their orders for the distributor to order less from the supplier? And how many different regions would need all of those people to all stop buying meat before the supplier put out less meat?

Now punish one company for what they’ve done. It’s in the news, the investors change their tactics, an entire industry could shift with one prosecution. This debate is beyond silly. It’s not individual responsibility. We didn’t cause it, it’s not on us to solve it. We couldn’t if we all tried. This entire community could go vegetarian and not even move the needle.