this post was submitted on 24 Jan 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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[–] BertramDitore@lemm.ee 28 points 1 week ago (2 children)

One thing this piece glaringly left out is that while many people talk about peat as a renewable resource, it’s really not. This is one of the first things they tell you if you’ve ever gone on a tour of distilleries in Scotland. “Renewable” typically is defined as resource replacement keeping up with the speed of use.

Peat accumulates at an average rate of one millimetre per year, in waterlogged environments where the lack of oxygen slows down or entirely halts the process of decomposition. Burning one cubic meter of extracted peat is the equivalent to releasing one thousand years of accumulated carbon. Source.

[–] stgermain77@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I agree that peat is not a renewable resource, but the calculation in the quotation is funny. If the cubic meter of peat is collected from 30 m by 30 m area it is only equivalent to one year of accumulation...

... excepting that it's not collected like so.

It's renewable in the same way that whale oil is renewable

[–] veganpizza69@lemmy.vg 7 points 1 week ago

Peat should be treated as the worst type of coal. Using it for horticulture is also an issue, at the very least due to the peat extraction being horrendously damaging ecologically and for the climate.