this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2025
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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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Computer models have been accurately predicting climate change for 50 years | A research scientist found that many 1970s-era models were ‘pretty much spot-on.’ Today’s models are far more advanced. (yaleclimateconnections.org)
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[–] Rhaedas@fedia.io 9 points 1 week ago

The reason weather prediction has become seemingly worse is because part of that forecast was based on using historical data to anticipate future events. That data isn't as great of a source now since things have changed, so they've had to extrapolate as best they can based on science of how weather systems work. Sometimes they get it close, something they totally miss.

As others have said, climate science is looking at a much bigger picture and trends with a different goal. I do disagree with title though - while the overall trend has been close to what was being warned about, the specifics have changed because we were limited then in what we knew and could measure, and there are things occurring that we couldn't have guessed about that will make things worse. The trend is still in the general direction, just how much of a change and how it affects conditions that drive weather change as we learn more.

Basically, you can't say that past models were perfect in their predictions and then have decades of "it's worse than predicted".