this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2023
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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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Big Oil and Big Coal countries Block meaningful G20 Climate Pledge, in wake of World's Hottest Summer on Record (www.juancole.com)
submitted 2 years ago by silence7@slrpnk.net to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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[–] iminahurry@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I find it laughable when journos focus on India's coal use. India has been way more aggressive on renewables as compared to what US was in this stage of their development cycle. The richest nation in the world, produces 7 times CO2 per capita compared to India, but somehow it's India's responsibility to focus on renewables and not the USA's, which is still using coal and oil like anything.

[–] MrMakabar@slrpnk.net 3 points 2 years ago

The problem is that India is building new coal power plants, which obviously cost money, which could be spend on green technology instead. So it actually makes sense to built renewables in India, use the money to be spend on coal power plants for that kind of stuff as well and maybe be a bit slower with the US coal exit.

Other then that the global coal situation is not that bad. China makes up 55% of global coal consumption. Europe and the US are consuming less every year. Besides China only Vietnam, India and Indonesia are building meaningfull numbers of new coal power plants. So currently there is quite a bit of pressure to stop those three countries from building more and hoping China sees a coal industry crash, due to maybe economic problems. That could kill global coal.

[–] silence7@slrpnk.net 2 points 2 years ago

The technological landscape is very different from what it was at this stage of the US's development cycle. India has the opportunity to avoid a lot of the pitfalls that the US encountered, and it's incredibly saddening to see it make the same mistakes when it has the opportunity to avoid them