this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2023
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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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[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 years ago (28 children)

Whataboutism doesn't super duper help with the problem of meat.

Like just looking at land usage, 80% of agricultural land is used for live stock or growing food for live stock. While only 20% calories come from live stock.

It's just so inefficient use of water and land. Even if every billionaire vanished, we will run out of clean water and good land if population grows and meat consumption doesn't.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (5 children)

Sure, but maybe we could start quantifying the scale of flights to COP28 in terms of hamburgers consumed? I'm tired of the burden to correct for industrial sized pollution being placed on the backs of consumers. Yes. My eating almost no beef over the course of a year helps. I can cut out the 10-12 cheeseburgers I eat. Will my 12 cheeseburgers a year balance a single analyst flight to COP28?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

No but you are not alone. 12 cheeseburgers times 8 billion people would balance thousands of COP28s. Thats what its about. Sure, one billionaire pollutes like 100k people, but a million people pollute like 10 billionaires.

Dont get me wrong though, Im definitely not saying big pollutors sholdnt be held responsible. And obviously youre already contributing to the cause.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

Oh for sure. 👍 The scale of that would be huge. It was like when Obama asked Americans to get oil changes and tune ups. The media acted like that was silly to ask, but that would have made a noticeable impact. I'm not disputing scale, but I doubt you'll get folks to cut back on beef so long as they see the wealthy aren't sacrificing anything. "Why should i give up MY creator comforts when ONE FLIGHT from a billionaire will undo all my sacrifices for a whole year?" We need some HUGE wealth taxes on the ultra-luxury gear that pollutes the most. THEN I think we can put more pressure on people to cut back on the small luxuries.

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