this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2025
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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 conclusion: if we want to save ourselves from ever more dangerous weather there is no alternative to halting the production of carbon dioxide in the first place.

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[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

How to bait liberals:

Give them an expensive, futuristic sounding, many partner collaborationship having, sophomorically technically novel, red herring strategy that will work, assuming an infinite amount of optimism, and also time, and funding.

When time is known to be limited, and funding is known to be precarious to secure, at best.

When this strategy predictably fails, throw up your hands and say 'well, I tried', content in the effort expended on a fundamentally flawed strategy.

On that note, how well are incremental strategies working to address homelessness and the housing crisis going?

Do we need to run some more viability pilot programs?

Oh whats that? All your funding to all those programs just got yoinked, after not going far enough to make a publically noticeable impact?

Dang thats rough, nobody coulda seen that comin'.

[–] inconel@lemmy.ca 4 points 3 months ago

No worries, the goal is to stop global warming and billionaires will soon throw money to something shiny like spraying diamonds and sulfur in the air.

[–] hector@lemmy.today 2 points 3 months ago

Just more selling tech as savior to justify biz as usual.

This is at least less harmful than geo engineering.

[–] CannonFodder@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago (2 children)

... yet.

All tech takes time and effort to develop to a point where it's useful. Sure there are a lot of dead ends too. But some carbon capture is better than none.

[–] fahfahfahfah@lemmy.billiam.net 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

the problem with carbon capture is it’s somewhat akin to saving money when you have loads of credit card debt. In order for it to make any sense at all you need the process to produce less carbon that powering it emits, which essentially means you have to power it with renewables, and until the world is on 100% renewables it would be better to just use them to replace fossil fuel production instead.

[–] CannonFodder@lemmy.world 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Sure. But it's better than nothing. There are renewable power sources available. It might not make sense now but unless we push the tech forward, it will never get there. At one point solar and wind weren't really viable options, but people pushed the tech forward and now they are.

[–] fahfahfahfah@lemmy.billiam.net 5 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

If it’s powered by fissile fuels, it’s literally worse than nothing. If it’s powered by renewables then instead of powering the carbon capture plant, we could be using that same power to reduce dependence on fossil fuels which would cause less carbon to get into the atmosphere in the first place than you could remove with the plant. Until we’re at the “okay we’ve stopped the bleeding now we need to reverse the damage” phase, carbon capture is a pointless endeavour that only exists so that corporations can say “see? Doesn’t matter that we’re polluting, we’ll just fix it with magic technology!”

Edit: just realized that I and the article are talking about two different things. I’m talking about carbon capture plants, article is talking about carbon capture at the source. That’s what I get for not reading the article before commenting.

[–] phutatorius@lemmy.zip 4 points 3 months ago

It really depends. If it displaces investment from a more effective solution, it's worse. And if the side effects are worse than the benefits, it's also worse.