this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
291 points (94.8% liked)

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

5194 readers
1008 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
[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You have to be incredibly naive to think a systemic problem can be solved by individual lifestyle changes

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Systemic problems need political fixes. Political fixes require collective action. And collective action is the sum total of individual lifestyle choices.

If you want government to act on the environment you need a critical mass of voters who put the environment first and punish politicians at the ballot box if they don't.

If you want corporations to act on the environment you need a critical mass of consumers who refuse to buy from corps that don't.

And you get to that critical mass by living your values and converting other people to those values.

So yeah, your asking for a paper straw doesn't make an impact. You being part of hundreds of thousands of people all asking for paper straws tells Starbucks they better pay attention.