this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2024
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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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The goal was always 1.5°C as long as I've been alive, and we aren't hitting it. In fact, we're not even on track to hit the 2°C.

The goal posts didn't move, buddy, we just already kicked the ball into the stands, and you're screaming that we can still win. Sorry, we lost, but at least we made the obscenely wealthy even wealthier in the meantime.

Oh, and all of the things I'm bringing up, those "shifting goalposts," are the things I was talking about us not understanding and rapidly building on top of each other year over year. You only keep talking about emissions: ok, cool, they're important, but they're not all that's involved, and even then, we're still** not hitting our own goals, so we deserve a pat on the back and a cake?

And while we're at it, how are the millions of people in America alone who can't afford a $400 car repair going to afford a $30k+ electric vehicle? Or are we going to overhaul our entire public transportation system overnight so people don't need to rely on cars at all? But then what about all the old ICE vehicles thrown in junkyards, leaching chemicals into the ground?

What about the Ogalala Aquifer and how we're pumping the water out of it way too quickly for it to naturally replenish? Y'know, the aquifer that essentially waters our entire crop growing landmass in the Midwest. We know pumping all of this groundwater out of the ground out in places like Nevada, Arizona, etc is terrible, yet I don't see any politicians banning the practice at the local, state, or federal level. What are emissions going to do about that, and what, are we just gonna pump the water back in to the underground aquifers that took millennia to naturally form?

How are emissions going to stop the soil erosion we've witnessed since the Dust Bowl? What emissions and electric car policies are stopping the growing of monoculture crops that need too much water to be grown where they are? How are fractionally dropping emissions going to reduce the use of fertilizers to grow the same crop over and over in the same place, not giving the soil time to naturally replenish, and further running freshwater supplies with pesticide runoff? Explain to me what laws regarding emissions and electric cars are going to address that?

While we're on the topic of food, who's ready to have the conversation about how you should only be able to buy and eat food that can be grown locally to your region? It is not environmentally responsible or sustainable, especially with current metrics, to ship millions of tons of food stuffs all over the globe, and this isn't even me trying to be a smartass: you should not be able to buy avocados in Minnesota, you shouldn't be able to buy chocolate in the Netherlands, etc. It's not sustainable, and the ships we use to move them are burning millions of tons of CO2 per trip.

Have you taken into account any of the economic factors of what it will take to upgrade our grid to handle that? Or to even get our infrastructure to be more energy efficient in general? Not our driving infrastructure, our actual buildings and dwellings, what's the plan there to make all of the dwellings in the US more energy efficient?

It's not just emissions, my man, there are millions of moving parts all feeding into each other in different ways, made even more complicated by our global interconnectedness and vastly varying priorities. But the goalposts never moved, we just didn't realize there were more of them than we initially thought, and focusing on one or two metrics that we're not even close to meeting, while also continuing to not also address anything else... Gore was our last shot, and it was robbed from us.