this post was submitted on 06 Mar 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:

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

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40% of global ship traffic is simply moving fossil fuels around! Renewables make much of this traffic obsolete (slrpnk.net)
submitted 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) by inari@piefed.zip to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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[–] bobzer@lemmy.zip 1 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

Plastics are a waste product of converting oil to useful fuels. That's why they're so cheap and used in the most unbelievably wasteful ways. They'll remain inextricably linked. Fuel is expensive, plastics are incredibly cheap. If we ban the use of fossil fuels but still rely on oil based plastics, plastics will become very expensive and we'll still be creating the fuel. We'll just have a growing supply of worthless energy sitting around and decaying in storage.

I'm not saying it's a bad idea as I'm not an expert by any means, but to keep plastics for essential uses like in medicine will likely require a heavily subsidized plastic industry at least. But hey we already subsidize the fossil fuel industry directly and by externalizing the planet destroying effects of their use...