this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2024
122 points (97.7% liked)

Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.

5178 readers
558 users here now

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:

Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] shalafi@lemmy.world 10 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

we don't even need to anymore

Sorry man, that's just naive. I don't think you have any idea how dependent we are, the scale of change required.

For example, how are we to farm? Know any plants cranking out battery powered farm equipment? Know any farmers that could afford such gear?

I'm not saying we can't do more, but we're inventing and deploying green energy solutions at an astonishing rate.

[–] 9point6@lemmy.world 5 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Government funding can answer all those questions if the will is there. The free market will not fix climate change without heavy intervention.

As per your example, there is nothing physically preventing a battery powered tractor or combine. A government could put out subsidies for manufacturers building these vehicles, the government could then subsidise farmers buying them, and perhaps remove existing subsidy on farmers refusing to decommission their older equipment.

The literal only things where there's not a money related solution to today is long range air travel, and some very specific industrial processes that require specific plastic polymers. Literally everything else has an alternative that can be either used immediately or built relatively quickly, if we decide to spend the money.

[–] skuzz@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

The energy required, despite the quantity of lithium (which wouldn't be available anyway) would just surge carbon output to later reduce it decades later. We can't capitalism our way out by making more things. Stopping making everything would actually help more, but would implode the planet's societies. Throttling energy use by AI and other expensive processes would do more, now. Pushing the use of public infrastructure, even busses, would do more now. Getting people to stop using cars would do more now. Forcing employers to require jobs that don't need a physical presence to all be work from home would do more now.

[–] ayyy@sh.itjust.works 4 points 2 weeks ago

The amount of lithium batteries that would required with our current tech is just staggering. The ingredients of a lithium battery are not smiles and sunshine and giggles.