this post was submitted on 09 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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2023 smashes record for world’s hottest year by huge margin | Rapid reduction in fossil fuel burning urgently needed to preserve liveable conditions, say scientists, as climate damage deepens (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 10 months ago by silence7 to c/climate
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[–] Anticorp@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

There should be fewer people. Idk why that is considered a hot take. There have never been this many people on the planet all at once before. There's no good reason to maintain this population level. That doesn't mean anyone alive should be unalived. It means providing people with sex education, contraceptives, and general education. It means people deciding to have 1 kid, or no kids, instead of 10 kids. I'm not providing any apologies for the mass polluters (corporations), but if there's fewer people in a generation or two, then there's fewer resources consumed to produce things for those people. Pointing out that our population has reached an unsustainable level doesn't mean we should stop working towards a green future either. People bring all these other ideas with them and link them to any suggestion that perhaps our population is too large, when that statement is meant as a stand-alone point, not some opening line to a grand conspiracy.

[–] Koarnine@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I agree wholeheartedly with what you are saying; when you expand on what you mean past just 'there are too many people' and actually suggest realistic meaningful solutions like you have here, I highly doubt that most people would 'accuse you of all sorts of things'. It's just that when you simply post 'there are too many people' this implies there should be less people, to most people they would interpret that to mean in an immediate sense, aka unaliving them.

Now that you've expanded on what you had to say I can see that clearly isn't what your intention was to convey. I would just like to say though that considering human population level is not a factor we can control without death or reducing birthrate, and birthrates are already reducing globally, you should be able to see why many would assume you are advocating for the other option.

[–] Anticorp@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago

Thanks for your response, and I'll be more mindful of how I convey that perspective in the future.