this post was submitted on 29 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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Back in the '90s I worked at an Internet startup that was playing the usual game of desperately seeking venture capital money to keep going. At one point we were wooing RJR Nabisco, a conglomerate that included the former RJ Reynolds Tobacco company that had branched out into venture capital because it was the fucking '90s and what else were they going to do with their gigantic piles of cash? One day some RJR-N executives came to visit and although we were a non-smoking company in a non-smoking building (our lease even disallowed smoking) we put ashtrays in the conference room and these motherfuckers spent the entire day chain-smoking. We had no ventilation to speak of and by the end of the day the smoke everywhere was so thick that you couldn't see the end of the 50' hallway. The office stank for weeks afterwards. My bosses almost fired me because I made a point of coughing really loudly every time I walked past the conference room door. And it was all for nought because they never gave us a penny.

The thing is, these executives had so thoroughly bought in to the corporate need to suppress factual information about the negative health consequences of smoking that they were perfectly willing to suffer those negative consequences themselves (and it's highly likely that they're all dead now thirty years on, which warms my heart a bit). It's no surprise at all that the people making gobs of money from fossil fuels have convinced themselves that global warming isn't really happening.