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)
submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by silence7@slrpnk.net to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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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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[–] federalreverse@feddit.de 1 points 10 months ago

Hence by stating that it might be a good idea to make forests specifically for the farming of carbon.

What you mean are not "old-growth forests" (article) but plantations, although they might be managed a bit differently than tree plantations today. They will fail at fostering ecosystem diversity and will not be particularly resilient. Dead material is vital for a living, thriving forest.

Since you imply that your idea has no alternatives: If we reduce consumption of animal products, we can drastically reduce the amount of farmland (as 70% of worldwide farmland is used to feed animals who in turn "waste" a lot of their feed, as they are not turning plant calories into animal calories 1:1). In many regions, this will allow growing forests or re-establishing swamps which will then be able to store CO2 again. Even farmland that is sustainably managed can store a lot of CO2, that just means allowing some nature on farms again and plowing a lot less.