this post was submitted on 20 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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Environmental advocates understand the announcement as a reversal, calling it “absolutely devastating.”

The Biden administration has backtracked from supporting a cap on plastic production as part of the United Nations’ global plastics treaty.

This represents a reversal of what the same groups were told at a similar briefing held in August, when Biden administration representatives raised hopes that the U.S. would join countries like Norway, Peru, and the United Kingdom in supporting limits on plastic production.

Nearly 70 countries, along with scientists and environmental groups, support the latter. They say it’s futile to mop up plastic litter while more and more of it keeps getting made.

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[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 42 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (12 children)

I noticed something weird about the comments here.

20 minutes after the post, treefrog posted his comment defining a "Fuck the Democrats ... I'm done voting for them" narrative. I've noticed that a lot of topics on Lemmy get tied back to not voting for the Democrats.

There then followed about an hour of, basically, silence, with that "Fuck the Democrats" comment as the top comment. Then I posted my response, disagreeing with treefrog.

After that, the next hour or so featured, not 0 comments like the previous hour, but 4 different comments. The only comments that got made, outside of my discussion with treefrog, were:

  • A top-level comment saying "Fuck the Biden administration" which took over the comment top spot
  • Other replies to treefrog's top level comment, pushing my response down

The total result is that the top two comments say "Fuck the Biden administration" and "Fuck the Democrats", and then there's general less focused conversation after that. The narrative is back, in these comments, that the right response to this is not to vote for the Democrats.

Maybe this sounds like conspiracy theory rock, but I've noticed this pattern before, where there's a "fuck the Democrats" narrative in the top comments, with the comments otherwise being quiet, and if something changes that narrative among the top comments, there's a little flurry of activity until the narrative is reestablished, and then things quiet down again.

Maybe I'm nuts. It definitely was notable to me, though. Especially given the weirdness of reacting to this particular story by instantly reaching for "Let's not vote for Democrats anymore!" as the solution to environmental problems. Like... out of all the strategies or reactions you could have, that's the first one that comes to mind?

Edit: Clarifications

Edit 2: The person who reported this for "incivility"... lol.

[–] AwakenedAce@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Maybe it's just a popular opinion on here, so when people click on the thread and see their opinions being mentioned they don't add more comments saying the same stuff as there's no point.

But then when they see someone else say something that differs from their own opinions, it's not unlikely that people tend to reply more to try and express themselves if they feel their opinions are no longer in the majority.

[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 3 points 1 day ago

Yeah, could be. The other thing I thought of was maybe there's something about sorting by "Active" that means that my comment pushes it up into being seen by more people, and that's why there are more comments when that happens.

It's just odd, though. The flurry of responses that come in-between a stable "fuck the Democrats" narrative at the top of the comments, and another "fuck the Democrats" narrative at the top of the comments, aren't really any kind of disagreement with me. It's just other top-level comments and random conversation. I would have to be able to show a little snapshot of how the comments looked at different points in time to really put across what it is about it that makes it seem really weird to me, honestly.

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