this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2025
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Climate

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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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[–] benjhm@sopuli.xyz 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Yes. Persistent contrails - i.e. aviation-induced cirrus clouds which spread in supersaturated air layers - are indeed bad for the climate, but often their effect is ignored as hard to quantify, while the simpler small effect of short-lived contrails is conveniently cited instead.
Also, while all high clouds have a warming effect by reflecting infra-red radiation back to earth, there can also be a cooling effect due to reflecting solar radiation, which is greater when the angle of the sun is low. So the net effect is warming in the middle of the day and at night, but cooling in morning and evening.

[–] despite_velasquez@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

Thanks for the insightful response, as with most things, there's nuance missing from the conversation