this post was submitted on 15 Nov 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.

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[–] Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Oil is not a viable option and the list is orders of magnitude larger than what you listed for nuclear. Sooo many (100s?) millions dead, whole culture ruined, etc.
I always think of 'antinuclear' as pro-oil because that is exactly what has been the case for the last 50 years, its only in the last (less than) decade that we actually started using old tech (solar, wind) to deliberately limit oil.

Outside of the land near fairly few nuclear accidents people won't be & aren't affected at all. The vast majority of nuclear plants lived and died as planned. But every fossil fuel operation is a massive carbon polluter.
(Even areas with higher radiation levels turned out to be way safer for mammals than expected, so human limits to radiation exposure are def way to strict and a bit of a result of Chernobyl propaganda in the west - so many villages, especially old people, returned and lived their lives out within the restricted zone, they died of old age and poverty, bcs they relied on Soviet pension plans which don't exist in Ukraine, so they had to grow all food)

I'm not under the impression you said anything good about oil, just that if we went the nuclear way like 50 years ago, we prob wouldn't even have this convo this way right now. And if we don't plan our economies, we can't really predict our power needs in eg 30 years.

Is the Chernobyl-warzone threat bright now more than some localised radiation that would be ignored either way?
(This is a genuine question, in case it sounds sarcastic)

When people hear of radiation they think of mutations, all sort of cancers (instead of just one), & birth defects, not of just the straightforward immediate tissue damage.

I just see so little reason not to continue to have nuclear energy as part of our repertoire of energy production, specifically a bit more regionally balanced (eg that almost every EU country would have some plants).