this post was submitted on 22 Sep 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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The enormously high price of e-fuels means that people are unlikely to choose them for any kind of application where electrification is possible. This means that marketing an e-fuel-capable petrol car is basically an effort to prolong the use of fossil fuels, rather than any kind of serious decarbonization effort.

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[โ€“] thbb@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Agreed.

Our modern social apparatus: education, health, police, justice... contributes about 1.4 teqCO2/person/year. Just our breathing, for a single person, emits about 350kg of CO2/year. This carbon we breath out is accounted for from our food. But you have to understand that it is the absolute minimum a living human being can emit.

Now, that leaves about 250kg eqCO2/person/year for everything else: housing, heating, leisure, traveling, clothing... if we think we need to stay under 2t eqCO2. This completely impossible.

Whereas if we were half as many, like 50 years ago, 4t/person/year still enables us to live a modern life.

[โ€“] HubertManne@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

this is often what I get to when someone comes in and says no we are underpopulated. For me the population max of the planet is the number of humans where ever single one of them can live a decent modern life and the planet can regenerate the harm we do in our modern existence. Even half at this point would have us at best treading water. To actually heal the planet we need to be about a billion. Really under it to heal and then maybe if we get really eco conscious or create enough technologies can go to 2 but for higher we need some sci fi tech to start showing up.