this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2024
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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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Eating Meat Is Bad for Climate Change, and Here Are All the Studies That Prove It (sentientmedia.org)
submitted 10 months ago by veganpizza69@lemmy.world to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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[–] Spzi@lemm.ee 8 points 10 months ago

most of the carbon is part of the earth’s existing carbon cycle

I'm afraid that's a bit too simplistic. I'll name a few reasons to give a hint why.

For example, both carbon dioxide and methane are "part of the earth's carbon cycle", but both have different climate impacts. Ruminants transform one into the other; from bad to worse.

Another person pointed out how meat production also involves burning fossil fuels, for example for transport. Or synthetic fertilizers.

Yet another reason is land use change. Meat production, being inherently less efficient due to more intermediate steps (see trophic levels), uses more land for the same amount of nutritions compared to plant based agriculture. This translates to more deforestation, more dried up wetlands, more desertification, and more stress on other species.

Finally, scale and speed make a difference. It's true that both carbon dioxide and methane are part of Earth's existing carbon cycle. Yet, the scale and speed at which we emit those is unprecedented.