this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2025
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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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Report: Climate change continues to drive warmer weather, extremes in Great Lakes region | The Great Lakes region has warmed almost 3 degrees, and precipitation has increased 15 percent (www.wpr.org)
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By the end of the century, warming of up to 10 degrees Fahrenheit is possible across the Great Lakes region under heavy use of fossil fuels.

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[–] trailee@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 weeks ago

“What that means is that you can probably keep growing timber and and hold lots of carbon at the same time,” Schwarzmann said.  “If you’re having (forestland) devoted just for carbon storage, you’re more likely to have even larger carbon sequestration levels on some of these forests.”

He said the findings could be used to re-evaluate timber harvest of older forests, noting logging could still occur while leaving a higher number of trees on the landscape to store carbon.

Forests are part of the carbon cycle, not effective long-term storage. It’s an easy mistake to make, thinking that since wood is made from carbon, growing trees should help remove carbon from the atmosphere. Trees can live for hundreds of years, which sounds like a long time to humans, but it’s not. Trees die and their carbon mostly returns to the atmosphere as they decompose or burn in a fire. Living trees are best represent a temporary carbon buffer, not sequestration.

Humans have been bringing sequestered carbon out of retirement - oil represents plants and animals that lived millions of years ago, that got trapped deep underground mostly by happenstance. To effectively remove carbon from the atmosphere, we must take the built up material and store it deep below the earth’s surface. I don’t think burying trees in a big pit will ever become especially popular.