this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2024
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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.

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The paper is here

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[โ€“] ohellidk@sh.itjust.works 2 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

so a typical comeback for this would go along the lines of "but the forests need fire to regrow" or " the forests were mismanaged and need thinned out".

that being said, do they actually regrow, or become barren landscapes forever? if so, thats not good. I'm just asking because I've heard a variety of things said that forests simply "come back" after these events. is any of that true?

[โ€“] silence7 3 points 6 hours ago

A lot of boreal forest does need low-intensity fire. This spaces trees out and prevents fuel accumulation so that the trees largely survive.

If you let things go, you end up killing all the seeds in the soil when an intense fire comes through, and depending on whether the local microclimate has changed, and what seed sources are actually available, you can end up with a very different plant community.

If you want to keep that from happening, it takes regular application of thinning and prescribed burns.