Climate

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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:

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

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Last month, climate scientist and author Kate Marvel resigned from her position at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, where she had spent more than a decade studying a warming world. In her resignation letter, she cited the Trump administration’s attacks on the field.

“I anticipated that our work would be questioned,” she wrote, “but only because its implications were politically inconvenient. I never expected that science itself would come under attack.”

Marvel joins more than 10,000 professionals with doctoral degrees in the sciences who have left the federal workforce since President Trump took office in January 2025: a period that has seen the administration evict the Goddard Institute from its historic home on the Columbia University campus, dissolve the U.S. Global Change Research Program, dismiss the nearly 400 authors of the next National Climate Assessment, and repeal the legal foundation for federal regulation of greenhouse gases.

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Most of the 15 bills being considered are part of a coordinated effort by groups linked to right-wing activist Leonard Leo.

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Prosecutors say Amit Forlit ran a global hacking operation on behalf of a Washington lobbying group that aimed to thwart environmental lawsuits against oil companies.

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New legislation comes amid push from big oil, as critics warn polluters’ profits prioritized over Americans’ health

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Renewable energy mandates to reduce greenhouse gas emissions generally have little impact on US gas prices

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Climate policy experts note that high electricity rates are in large part due to increased demand from such things as data centers and artificial intelligence, and that non-polluting solar and wind energy are cheaper than fossil fuels.

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The paper is here

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For years, climate scientists have projected that South Texas would grow hotter and drier—that drought cycles would lengthen, that rainfall would become less reliable, and that the water systems built for a wetter century would eventually face conditions they were never designed to absorb. In Corpus Christi, that projection has become a daily operational reality.

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MYTHS & FACTS
Happy news about the future of energy Straight talk by Christian Stöcker

There is a ton of very good news when it comes to the development of renewable energy, battery technology and electric mobility. However, most of us are unaware of the true scale and speed of the global transformation in these areas and that the growth rates in such ecologically safer technologies are staggering. This talk aims to throw light on positive developments in the energy sector and how this momentous market shift also explains some of the increased aggression of fossil fuel interest groups and their political allies.

Books in the session:
Männer, die die Welt verbrennen

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An earlier spring affects when migratory birds arrive, leaves emerge, and fruit ripens — among plants and animals that determine ecosystem health.

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The fossil fuel economy is finished.

The only question is whether it manages to drag a lot of human civilization into it's grave

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This is part of a broad closure of US Forest Service research stations in order to prevent research on the link between a warmer world and more wildfires.

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