this post was submitted on 11 May 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 world’s largest direct carbon capture plant just went online (www.engadget.com)
submitted 4 months ago by jeffw@lemmy.world to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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[–] blindbunny@lemmy.ml 0 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

Has anyone done the math and figured out if these things are more efficient than trees? I have my doubts but I'm also a pleb so idk how to compare them.

[–] federalreverse@feddit.de 0 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

I mean just looking at the amount of concrete in that picture, I get pessimistic. When will this particular site have dug itself out of the carbon "hole" created by its construction?

As for trees: That is really, really hard to measure and even harder to know in advance. Some factors appear to be:

  • different tree species store different amounts of carbon
  • tree plantation or actual forest?
  • prior use of the site (e.g. meadows do store carbon too)
  • development over time (most trees need to grow a couple years before they start storing significant amounts of carbon)
  • failure of sites due to being planted in a bad way (e.g. a lot of Chinese Green Wall sites and quick-buck billion tree projects seem to be affected by this)
[–] lluki@feddit.de 0 points 4 months ago

How do you measure "efficiency" ? By money spent? Then yes, trees are currently cheaper. But trees are complicated (see other comments). Additionally, even if we cover the whole landmass with trees, there is still a catastrophic amount of Co2 left in the atmosphere.