this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2026
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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:

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[–] BedSharkPal@lemmy.ca 16 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I still can't believe coal is the reason there is mercury in fish. Fuck coal.

[–] cogman@lemmy.world 8 points 1 day ago

IKR? That was a surprising fact to me.

It's the worst of all the fossil fuels. They all suck, but coal sucks the most. Expensive and dangerous to mine. Requires a buttload. Releases all sort of nasty pollutants. Doesn't fully burn to CO2. And is slow to ramp so it's only really good for a baseload.

If coal wasn't used for iron smelting, it would have never been used to for power generation.

I honestly assumed a ton of ‘waste’ mercury just got dumped into the ocean before we knew that was bad. Which I guess is sort of what happened, it just went through the atmosphere first.