this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
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Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.

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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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Earth Was Due for Another Year of Record Warmth. But This Warm? Scientists are already busy trying to understand whether 2023’s off-the-charts heat is a sign that global warming is accelerating. (www.nytimes.com)
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[–] PrinceWith999Enemies@lemmy.world 13 points 10 months ago (2 children)

If I remember from the last time I was reading about it, the IPCC wasn’t using models that include feedback loops because they tend to be fairly conservative and there’s a number of different ways assumptions can be made.

I’m a biologist and not a climate scientist, but my understanding is that while feedback loops are widely accepted as being part of the dynamic, there’s a number of different approaches and those are available in individual modeling projects but not in the consensus models. I’m not sure if that’s changed, though.

[–] kglitch@kglitch.social 15 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

The IPCC report must be agreed upon by representatives from every country. Including Saudi Arabia, and USA. So you can imagine how "conservative" it is compared to reality. Anything slightly uncomfortable gets negotiated down to the point where the oil-producing countries are fine with it.

The 195 member countries of the IPCC sign off on different parts of the report. The summaries for policymakers are “approved,” meaning that “the material has been subject to detailed, line-by-line discussion” between the member countries and the authors. The synthesis reports are “adopted,” which implies “a section-by-section discussion.” And the full report, which this year runs nearly 4,000 pages long, is “accepted,” which means both parties agree that “the technical summary and chapters of the underlying report present a comprehensive, objective, and balanced view of the subject matter.”

https://qz.com/2044703/how-governments-of-the-world-have-responded-to-the-ipcc-report

If people find the IPCC reports alarming as they are, imagine how alarming the draft from the scientists is before the Saudis, Russians and Americans get out the black markers.

[–] spaduf@slrpnk.net 2 points 10 months ago

This is largely because we simply don't have the capabilities to model these systems with the accuracy needed to make useful predictions. Individuals, however, should absolutely be aware that things can go bad far quicker than we're able to deal with.