this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2023
120 points (98.4% liked)

Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.

7116 readers
367 users here now

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:

Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 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.