this post was submitted on 06 Feb 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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‘In a word, horrific’: Trump’s extreme anti-environment blueprint | driving forward fossil fuel production, sidelining scientists and overturning rules (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 9 months ago by silence7 to c/climate
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[–] silence7 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The US has meaningfully cut coal use, resulting in an overall emissions drop, and put in place the measures which will sharply lower the need for oil in the coming years. It makes total sense to support Biden in light of those.

[–] MrMakabar -1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The lower coal lead to 2.5% drop in US CO2 emissions since 1990. At that rate the US is at zero emissions in only 1200years. That is not what meaningful change looks like.

[–] silence7 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Peak US coal use was in 2007. This makes it very misleading to use a linear trend based on data starting in 1990.

I'll attribute the date of the peak to the Obama mercury regulations, which made it substantially cheaper to avoid coal. The continued drop is in large part because gas, wind, and solar, and short-term storage have become cheaper over time. Part of this is due to an improved regulatory environment and subsidy system under Biden.