this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2025
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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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These are the cheapest source of new electricity, and are generally cheaper than running existing coal-burning power plants

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[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Suiciding the mid and long-term economic prospects of the US for the sake of populism (it's literally already cheaper to go renewable than use fossil fuels, even the cheapest which is gas, plus the main side effects of widespread use of a technology is all those companies that pop up in that tech domain so blocking approval of renewable projects in the US, means American companies in that domain will be less likely to succeed that those in other countries).

And this happens right alongside with betting like crazy in a technological direction - the most bubbly and with less specific uses parts of AI, such as LLMs - which is so far is deeply net negative in economic terms - it costs way more in energy than it delivers in increased efficiency - and whose rate of improvement has already fallen massivelly so is unlikely to become a net positive across the Economy - though there will certainly be specific net positive areas, just not massivelly so - were curiously, the Chinese with their models that consume much less power, have already done more to make it net positive than American companies.

China's work to take over as the world's superpower has never been this easy.