this post was submitted on 28 Sep 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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Those meteorologists get basically all their data from NOAA. They aren’t running the weather satellites and radars and they definitely aren’t flying planes into the eyes of hurricanes to measure the wind speed. The weather app on your iPhone uses data that ultimately comes from the NOAA.

The budget for NOAA (that has the National weather service, the hurricane center, etc.) was $6.35 billion in 2023 and their budget request this year is $6.6 billion. To compare, we just gave Israel, a rich country, (yet another) $8.7 billion aid package. Basically everything the government does is a rounding error on defense ^1^, Medicaid, and Medicare. NOAA might be the best value-for-money we spend.

^1^ Keep in mind, the $800bn plus DoD budget is only a part of defense spending. The Department of Energy manages the nuclear weapons, Veterans Affairs is its own department. The Department of Homeland Security has the intelligence agencies, border patrol, etc. Total defense spending is well past $1 trillion no matter how you want to count it.