this post was submitted on 13 Oct 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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[–] notabot@lemm.ee 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Those are fair points, but consider that they just put the next civilization at the same level we were; we didn't have the technological know-how until we invented it, we didn't know how or why to use different ores until we worked it out, we didn't know where the ores were to be found until we gound them, and harvesting pre-refined material is much less intensive than that, and well, we've warred, and continued to war over access to resources.

Basically, we've dug up lots of the easily accessible ore, which has a low density (you need to dig up maybe 4 tonnes of rock to get a tonne of iron ore, and that is only between 50-75% iron, for instance) and buried it more shallowly, and at higher density. There's still work to do to extract it, but it's manageable with fairly low tech.

Energy sources are a little more complex, but we've bound up a lot of hydrocarbons in plastic and the like, which should be usable, if not ideal in their raw form.

[–] xapr@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Those are good points too, that I hadn't thought about. I thought it would be challenging, but maybe it wouldn't be as challenging as I had imagined it.

But who knows, maybe we would be better off going back to pre-industrial times anyway?

[–] notabot@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But who knows, maybe we would be better off going back to pre-industrial times anyway?

But how would I find interesting conversations on Lemmy if my highest tech gadget was a loom?!? :)

[–] xapr@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 1 year ago

Haha, we would have to go back to the printed press and handwritten letters!