this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2025
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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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Microplastics hinder plant photosynthesis, study finds, threatening millions with starvation (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 1 day ago by houseofleft@slrpnk.net to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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The pollution of the planet by microplastics is significantly cutting food supplies by damaging the ability of plants to photosynthesise, according to a new assessment.

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[–] Zacryon@feddit.org 11 points 1 day ago (2 children)

“Humanity has been striving to increase food production to feed an ever-growing population [but] these ongoing efforts are now being jeopardised by plastic pollution,” said the researchers, led by Prof Huan Zhong, at Nanjing University in China.

Meanwhile:

In 2022, the world wasted 1.05 billion tonnes of food. This amounts to one fifth (19 per cent) of food available to consumers being wasted, at the retail, food service, and household level. That is in addition to the 13 per cent of the world’s food lost in the supply chain, as estimated by FAO, from post-harvest up to and excluding retail.
• [...] Out of the total food wasted in 2022, households were responsible for 631 million tonnes equivalent to 60 percent, the food service sector for 290 and the retail sector for 131.
• Reducing food waste provides compounding benefits: Food loss and waste generates 8-10 per cent of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions – almost five times the total emissions from the aviation sector. It occurs while 783 million people are hungry and a third of humanity faces food insecurity.

Source: UN Environment Programme – Food Waste Index Report 2024 (Key Messages)

[–] houseofleft@slrpnk.net 11 points 1 day ago

Thanks for sharing! This is really important context. It's worth mentioning as well that our current food systen, particularly concerning the amount of meat in it, is pretty far from being an efficient use of crops.

[–] naught101@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

Those numbers seem worrying. 68% of food making it from farm to mouth seems very high. I suspect there are some inherent inefficiencies that mean it'll never be close to 100. We are also pushing up against the limits of available farmland and a number of key nutrients. And the population is still growing...