this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2024
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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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NOAA also collects and analyzes key climate data

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[–] memfree@beehaw.org 10 points 4 months ago

It further notes that scientific agencies such as NOAA are “vulnerable to obstructionism of an Administration’s aims,” so appointees should be screened to ensure that their views are “wholly in sync” with the president’s.

do we want flood-risk predictions sponsored by a flood-insurance company, or heat advisories from an air-conditioning conglomerate?

The agency is home to one of the most significant repositories of climate data on Earth, which includes information on shifting atmospheric conditions and the health of coastal fisheries, plus hundreds of thousands of years’ worth of ice-core and tree-ring data.

Eliminating or privatizing climate information won’t eliminate the effects of climate change. It will only make them more deadly.

It sounds like the counter to this is to point out to voters that they don't really want to pay more for fish because fishermen can't get data, and we don't want planes to be even less reliable AND cost more because the government stops tracking upper level wind speeds, and that, generally, we want people who get a salary for doing accurate work rather than people who get paid to say whatever the bossman want to hear. Ask them to imagine how it would work if Google, NBC, Amazon, and Fox each sunk the money for trying to replicate the existing infrastructure and then sold pieces of it to paying customers -- such as Allstate, CBS, and Delta Airlines. Everyone else would have to HOPE they were getting complete data and have to wonder what was missing. Noticing record highs and lows would become proprietary and forbidden from broadcast in a way akin to being disallowed from referencing "The Superbowl" unless you pay for a license. How's any of that going to work?