this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2025
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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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Falsehoods around the L.A. fires are proliferating on the right | Anything to keep the realities of climate change from spreading. (wapo.st)
submitted 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) by silence7@slrpnk.net to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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[–] hotelbravo722@slrpnk.net 20 points 6 days ago

Californian here and fire lookout. So although no official cause has been made I will give my best educated guess based on my knowledge of the region and knowledge of wildfires.

So normally we get some small amount of moisture during the late fall/winter months but it has been bone dry since May 2024. Since the drought came on the heels of huge wet season you have a lot of shrubs, grasses and dead chaparral(fuel) all over the mountain regions. Now we are coming into the new year and a massive atmospheric pressure system has built up over the desert regions that then force air through the canyon areas and into the Los Angeles basin(oxygen). These are called Santa Ana winds and are usually very intense however because of the earth being at 1.5C above pre-industrial levels those intense winds became hurricane force winds very quickly, we are talking 80-100mph. With all of these elements at play all that was needed was an ignition. Now that can be anything from a car backfiring, rocks colliding with each other and sparking to mylar ballon’s from birthday parties reflecting enough direct sunlight to ignite a leaf. Once that ignition source was created the fire had everything it needed to quickly go from a small flame to a massive wildfire.

With all these factors at play it was only a matter of time before a wildfire started. 4 fires is extremely abnormal however so are 80-100 mph Santa Ana winds and these longer dry seasons. I was born and have grown up and lived in this region for 30+ years, only once did I see a Santa Ana wind event that was as intense as it was Tuesday night however it has been getting hotter and dryer in Los Angeles for as long as I have lived here and it was only a matter of time before something like this hit. We were as prepared as we could have been for this and it still was not enough.

Also it’s not over yet, high winds are expected to pick up Thursday night-Friday morning and the fires are still not contained.