this post was submitted on 04 Dec 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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Can we really fuel planes with fat and sugar? (www.bbc.com)
submitted 11 months ago by silence7 to c/climate
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[–] sonori@beehaw.org 3 points 11 months ago

We could also scale synthetic fuel made from atmospheric carbon, we’ve had the tech for decades after all, it’s just a lot more expensive than stealing it from the ground. While algae might be easier, i have doubts as to plant based biofuel owing largely to the land and water use required to scale up to the levels we need. I don’t doubt that with greenhouses and desalination it could be done, but labor, capital, and effort wise i would expect algae or chemical systhasis to come out on top.

Problem is that either way it takes more energy to make than it receives, which when we constantly burn oil for power is a net loss, but at the same time it’s the only long term solution for applications like long term flight.