this post was submitted on 05 Mar 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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[–] stabby_cicada@slrpnk.net 9 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

Is it just me, or is it vaguely racist how dismissive that article was of "ancient civilizations" and the idea that indigenous myths might be retellings of the Younger Dryas impacts? I feel like there's always aggressive pushback from "modern scientists" whenever the idea comes up that indigenous myths speak of real historical events. It feels like, in the US and Canada particularly, Native Americans aren't allowed to have histories - that the history of Native Americans began when white settlers arrived to write those histories down. They want to pretend the thousands of years of history passed down through tribal oral traditions never existed at all and Native peoples simply existed, like animals, without memory of past or hope of future, until civilized Europeans brought history to the Americas. When what really happened was most of the people who remembered those oral traditions died in the colonial apocalypse, and those settlers danced on the graves of history.

All that is to say, the science might be one way or another, but the dismissive attitude taken towards oral tradition and mythic history really rubs me the wrong way.

[–] kemsat@lemmy.world 5 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

It is not just you. Two posts down on my feed, there’s a post about an article describing ancient European societies as sophisticated.

[–] DistractedDev@lemm.ee 2 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Have you ever played the telephone game? Things change as people retell a story. Science is based on information directly from the source. It has to be verifiable. It's ok to use the stories to learn about a culture and their history, but they aren't suitable for science.

[–] ThatWeirdGuy1001@lemmy.world 5 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Yeah but you can gleam certain real details by listening to all the stories.

All the stories are going to be unique and different but if they share certain details repeatedly then you can generally assume those details as being actual events rather than just mythology.

Like if every story you hear talks about a mountain breaking and breathing fire you can logically assume there was a volcanic eruption. If every story talks about the earth splitting apart and swallowing buildings whole you can logically assume there was an earthquake.

People didn't always know what certain natural disasters were or why they happened so they would create stories to explain them. Sometimes those stories are simply explained in such a way that a modern person couldn't possibly understand the meaning behind them.

Like sacrificing someone to a volcano to appease the fire god. The fire god is the volcano itself and they're just trying to keep it from erupting and killing them all.

[–] silence7@slrpnk.net 2 points 8 months ago

There are a number of examples of oral traditions including description of events a few hundred years prior. Further than that, and stuff tends to be garbled enough that it's tough to tell whether people are talking about the same event

[–] magiccupcake@lemmy.world 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I really dislike how it's become a conspiracy, because now it's hard to pin out the good science from it.

Other fringe theories are fun to think about and debate, like the planet 9 hypothesis, which is becoming increasingly unlikely, and to a lesser effect modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND). Fringe theories are important to push forward the boundary of knowledge, even if most of them are wrong.

[–] silence7@slrpnk.net 6 points 8 months ago

Yeah, it speaks to having an online discourse system which values engagement over truth. That's incredibly damaging.