this post was submitted on 29 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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[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 15 points 8 months ago (4 children)

Yeah, in a way, I still find it shocking how we've come out of a year of climate-related crisis and the COP, which could have been a crisis taskforce meetup was just a handwaving event.
There were several nations represented there, that got hit hard this year by climate change. Why are these not demanding measures to limit damages?

Honestly even, why are there still people working against this? What the hell are you going to do with your immorally amassed wealth in a world that's falling apart?

[–] 31337@sh.itjust.works 7 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I've been reading about what some of what the rich and powerful openly state they believe, and it's pretty scary. They are extremely out of touch with reality. I wonder what they believe that they're not open about.

So far, I've read about:

Effective altruism

  • seems to be about exploiting people to amass as much wealth as they can, then use that wealth to "help" humanity by building space ships to launch rich people into space or something.

Effective accelerationism

  • explicitly doesn't care about humanity, only "technocapitalism." Is fine with AI destroying humanity, because that would be the natural evolution of intelligence.

Peter Theil

  • believes all kinds of crazy shit. Women and democracy are a danger to humanity because they're anti-"libertarian". World should be a collection of city-states or floating cities ruled by corporations.
[–] ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 6 points 8 months ago

Back in the '90s I worked at an Internet startup that was playing the usual game of desperately seeking venture capital money to keep going. At one point we were wooing RJR Nabisco, a conglomerate that included the former RJ Reynolds Tobacco company that had branched out into venture capital because it was the fucking '90s and what else were they going to do with their gigantic piles of cash? One day some RJR-N executives came to visit and although we were a non-smoking company in a non-smoking building (our lease even disallowed smoking) we put ashtrays in the conference room and these motherfuckers spent the entire day chain-smoking. We had no ventilation to speak of and by the end of the day the smoke everywhere was so thick that you couldn't see the end of the 50' hallway. The office stank for weeks afterwards. My bosses almost fired me because I made a point of coughing really loudly every time I walked past the conference room door. And it was all for nought because they never gave us a penny.

The thing is, these executives had so thoroughly bought in to the corporate need to suppress factual information about the negative health consequences of smoking that they were perfectly willing to suffer those negative consequences themselves (and it's highly likely that they're all dead now thirty years on, which warms my heart a bit). It's no surprise at all that the people making gobs of money from fossil fuels have convinced themselves that global warming isn't really happening.

[–] irreticent@lemmy.world 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Didn't you see Don't Look Up? They're all hoping for a golden ticket to the naked people planet.

On a more serious note, it's because all the rich and powerful people killing the planet will be dead before it gets really bad.

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 1 points 8 months ago

That's why they have no reason to care, but it's not a reason why they're actively working against humanity. They're hopefully not planning to bequeath their wealth, because of, you know, the whole destroying-the-planet thing.
So, once they're rich enough to live the rest of their lives in prosperity, just like, stop? Their life won't garner more meaning by having the bank account high score. In fact, they're destroying meaning, because of, you know, the whole destroying-the-planet thing.

I'm sorry, this rant isn't directed at you. I just get angry thinking about that asshat with his self-righteous smile.