this post was submitted on 13 Apr 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:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
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Not really a fair comparison.
Fossil fuels have been sequestered for tens to hundreds of millions of years and represent additionally hundreds of millions of years of carbon accretion.
And we burn enough fossil fuels that it's like burning down the entire Amazon rain forest every couple months.
So over a year or so. That's kind of like burning down every piece of vegetation, and every building, and pretty much anything that's flammable on the surface of the Earth ... burnt to ashes and dust.
How that's as bad as burning some wood pellets I'm really not sure how you conflate such things....
Another important thing is that the vast majority of petroleum (crude oil) came from sea life, algae and plankton, which still act as "carbon sinks" but are dying off in the oceans thanks to pollution, acidification and warmer waters.
It's more that converting a power plant from burning fossil fuels isn't going to improve things, as the change in forest cover associated with that conversion results in similar emissions. We need to stop burning stuff at scale.
It doesn't. The Amazon is still massive. Land use change had turned the Amazon into a source and not a sink of carbon.
You can burn all the trees you want... Again. This is conserved. The carbon released will grow exactly that amount of new trees.
Unless you also stop the cycle. Then we're really fucked.
Like 116F... Plants die. If the equatorial or other regions hit that consistently, desertification is guaranteed.