this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2023
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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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Let forests grow old to store huge volume of carbon – study | Report says cutting emissions should still be key priority as it cautions against mass monoculture tree-planting (www.theguardian.com)
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For context, this would in theory allow about 1/3 historical cumulative emissions to be absorbed over a century or so. Which is a start, but nowhere near enough.

Also noteworthy: the bulk of forest-based carbon offsets have been fraudulent.

The paper is here

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[–] TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago

I mean, I don't outright agree. Forests evolved in systems where nutrients were continuously recycled. Specifically, the accumulation of soil carbon is a major aspect of fertility in forested systems, and we don't really know how deep most soil goes. Then of course you have churn from tree fall, etc..

I've got a paper in review now about the relationship between carbon fertilization in forest soils. We saw about double the NPP beyond what we expected in areas were additional litter contributed to soil formation. High carbon soils ended up having even more carbon than we expected, due to non-linearties of carbon additions.

It might be that by removing large quantities of carbon from these systems we fundamentally alter the nutrient cycling. What happens to NPP when you pull carbon that isn't supposed to leave?