this post was submitted on 11 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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Scientists call for 'major initiative' to study whether geoengineering should be used on glaciers (phys.org)
submitted 1 month ago by Midnight@slrpnk.net to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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[–] benjhm@sopuli.xyz 3 points 1 month ago

I'm no fan of geoengineering (see this paper from 1996 ) but these specific proposals seem local, potentially reversible interventions to slow down melting, so could be worth investigating. Even if we get to net zero and stabilise the global surface temperature, it would take much longer (decades-centuries) to stabilise ice- melt, deep-ocean warming and consequent sea-level rise, there is a lot of inertia.
Their second approach focuses on meltwater, but thatt has to flow somewhere, maybe better focus to keep ice solid - e.g. I'm surprised no mention is made of the ice-surface albedo - e.g. minimising soot, algae. Minimising aviation-cirrus from planes passing over greenland might also help.