this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2023
431 points (98.2% liked)

Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.

5301 readers
408 users here now

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:

Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
silence7@slrpnk.net
431
World's richest 10% produce half of global carbon emissions, says Oxfam (2015) (slrpnk.net)
submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by iraq_lobster@slrpnk.net to c/climate@slrpnk.net
47 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/02/worlds-richest-10-produce-half-of-global-carbon-emissions-says-oxfam

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Transporter_Room_3@startrek.website 25 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but given what I know a small bit about planetary poverty, if you're reading this from a place with heaTing or air conditioning, on your own personal smart device or computer, you aren't in that bottom 50%.

If I remember right, even with my problems I'm not even in the bottom 60%. Some places make in a month what I make in a day, when I have work.

[–] Pohl@lemmy.world 12 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Rating wealth by income (which this study does) is unusual and difficult. I don’t actually see any income numbers attached to their analysis which is suspicious.

Anyway, anyone with a net worth of around 90k USD is in that top 10%. Median net worth in the US was 127k in 2019. Which means that more than half of the 350M people in this country are in the worlds richest 10% (by wealth)

Picking a random American off the street gives you better than coin toss odds of finding a person in the “mega polluter” group you see in the thumbnail graph.

[–] Transporter_Room_3@startrek.website 11 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Even doing everything you can to "reduce carbon footprints" it's still going to be orders of magnitude larger than a small village farmer in the middle of Nepal.

Doesnt mean it's not worth doing, it just means there's a lot more to be done.

[–] stebo02@sopuli.xyz 10 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Still though, if you're gonna split up that top 10% into 10 more parts, you will probably once again find that the top 1% is responsible for most of the emissions that the top 10% is responsible for.

[–] stabby_cicada@slrpnk.net 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Guaranteed if you own a house in the US you're part of the world's top 10% in terms of wealth.

That doesn't translate directly to emissions, though, because the vast majority of emissions are industry and travel, so what you buy and how you live are much greater factors than heating and cooling. Go vegan and you instantly drop out of that "contribute to 50% of lifestyle emissions" zone.