this post was submitted on 16 Aug 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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[–] karpintero@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Informative article. On an individual level, there are some things the average person can do: reduce meat consumption, replace turf with native or drought tolerant plants, capture rain water, etc.

However, several orders of magnitude more water used is for agriculture where there are clear inefficiencies, e.g. growing alfalfa in the desert that gets shipped overseas for livestock feed or irrigating with sprayers during the day. We also should reevaluate the viability of maintaining things like golf courses in Arizona before needing to ration water in those places.

[–] tacoface 3 points 1 year ago

And reducing food waste! I was surprised to see that individual/household food waste is so significant in terms of agricultural impact.