this post was submitted on 12 Dec 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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[–] perestroika@slrpnk.net 2 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

Solvay's factory reported only 56 kilograms of SF₆ emissions for 2023 to Germany's industrial emissions register. The scientist's estimates are 500 times higher: around 30 tons. Its effect on the atmosphere is more than that of 700,000 tons of CO₂ due to the high global warming potential of SF₆, comparable to a coal-fired power plant.

So, in terms of how much they probably lied: really bad.

In terms of whether this one factory could significantly screw up climate: not as bad. Footprint is roughly the size of a large coal-burning plant going at full load.

They obviously have to fix their leaks + pay for their emissions + pay a large fine + show their internal documents to make it clear if this was intended.

[–] benjhm@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 day ago

SF6 emissions are bad news, but thanks for reporting it. Wondering whether Solvay HQ in belgium had any role in covering this up ?
I recall using SF6 30 years ago to study ocean gas fluxes, but only microlitres, as we knew about it’s crazy high GWP even then.

[–] Mihies@programming.dev 3 points 1 day ago

They deserve long prison time at least. But hey, who am I kidding, right.