this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2024
24 points (100.0% liked)

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

7207 readers
160 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
silence7@slrpnk.net
24
South African city copes with climate change by chopping down trees (wapo.st)
submitted 2 years ago by silence7@slrpnk.net to c/climate@slrpnk.net
1 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

While preserving the world’s forests is widely considered essential to combating climate change, scientists in South Africa have determined that invasive tree species are sucking up so much groundwater that the area is better off eliminating the trees.

top 1 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] benjhm@sopuli.xyz 1 points 2 years ago

Hope they thought through the whole story. Cape town has a micorclimate squeezed between sea and desert, so it may be a special case, but in general as climate changes, plants should be able to migrate too. Trees evapo-transpire, large areas of trees help to create clouds, and convection cells, and maybe rain. So such policy might help increase groundwater in the short term, but not in the longer term.