this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2023
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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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Airlines have a big climate problem, and it’s not just CO2 emissions | A Virgin Atlantic flight made waves for flying without fossil fuels. But it was also a test for studying contrails (www.canarymedia.com)
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[–] echo64@lemmy.world 6 points 2 years ago

Ugh, "sustainable air fuel" is still throwing greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, it's just the latest greenwashing attempt from the fuel industry.

[–] benjhm@sopuli.xyz 3 points 2 years ago

This warming effect of persistent contrails / cirrus is hardly new - IPCC even made a special report on aviation back in 1999 quantifying this. We used to reckon the ratio of total-effects / CO~2~-alone was higher than reported in this article - partly as there is also a NOx / Ozone effect not discussed here, but also as such ratio depends strongly on how you integrate over time (as for all metrics like GWP).
More systematic measurements might be useful, as avoiding super-saturated layers, or re-timing flights (the net effect of high clouds depends on angle of the sun) could be one of the cheapest short-term climate mitigation actions to take. However it's not true that "research institutions ... are only just beginning to develop the tools for making such predictions", the industry has just delayed considering this, by diplomatically passing the buck to ICAO. We had a related project, but our government dodged the issue as it was linked to shipping, and it seemed air traffic control were just afraid of extra work.
Long-term of course, it doesn't solve the problem of the CO~2~, I'm not a believer in any significant quantity of "sustainable fuel", prefer to cross continents by train.