this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2024
268 points (100.0% liked)

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

6473 readers
478 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 2 years ago
MODERATORS
top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 65 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Good luck...we can't even get companies to stop poisoning drinking water for entire cities..you won't stop Elon from doing whatever he wants when he and his buddies can just buy new laws.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 10 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago

That was before Fox "News" and the GOP made cooperation, or the pretense of cooperation, a mortal sin.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 10 months ago (4 children)

How about we wait until the science is actually in before kneejerking around? We have had the science equivalent of a shower thought, actual work and analysis needs to be done before jumping to conclusions.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 10 months ago (1 children)

How about we wait until the science is actually in before sending hundreds and thousands of satellites into LEO?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

That's an interesting idea to consider (if I understand you correctly in that you are stating that there should be a central research authority that regulates what companies are allowed to do). Though, I wonder if it's still better to sue for damages after the fact and create regulations to cover the oversight. There's also the issue of data — you can't exactly study an issue before it exists. If you are instead inferring that a company should conduct this sort of safety research themselves, it creates a sort of prisoner's dilemma: companies wouldn't be to keen on sharing their research with others, and if they are forced to, a company wouldn't want to be the one to waste the money on it for others to profit off of.

I'd also like to note that this sort of regulation has no business being the decision of a single country, but, instead, it should be the decision of a global government, as it is an issue that affects the whole planet. How such a global government should be structured, though, I am not yet certain. The UN doesn't exactly cut it.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago

Let's fire some shit in the atmosphere first and then let scientists figure it out when it's too late anyway. Absolute boomer shit

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

Urm i think the rocket needs to wait instead of us

[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Best be hoping Tesla collapses and Elon gets his with the SEC. When TSLA falls, he will lose his connections and no one will be willing to protect him, just another loser millionaire white guy and sometimes the government does go after them.

Elon will likely be fried at that point because he will have committed the worst crime in America: messing with rich people’s money.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago (1 children)

But it's going to make him slightly richer! How could you be so selfish?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

Omg imagine elon having 100billion dollars, that would be so lit fam

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago (10 children)
load more comments (10 replies)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago (1 children)

SpaceX has been receptive to design changes to starlink in the past to minimize impact, like decreasing reflectivity and reflection angles for astronomers. They might be receptive to moving to different alloy for the body construction.

Magnesium comes to mind that would be light but expensive. Steel alloys might be cheap and heavy options for later when starship is operational. Would those have similar effects on ozone, or is it only the aluminum oxides? Carbon fiber also looks promising. It could be pretty cheap and light if you can keep it planar rather than custom formed. Someone had mentioned wood in a different thread, but I'm uncertain if that'd work because of off gassing.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

This feels like a copypaste of the same comment from a similar thread a few days ago.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago

I find it funny that even the problems he "invents" are not new.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago (4 children)

Have yet to see any of these 'studies' take into account and compare with natural meteorite effects, which are orders of magnitude larger than the satellites.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Are you just doing the thing where you cast doubt on journal articles because they feel wrong? You don't think humans can affect the natural environment in such a way? This sounds oddly familiar and a bit ironic for this community....

Meteors aren't made out of aluminum like satellites are btw. There will be more reasearch done and we will learn more. But for now, there's a potential issue.

https://phys.org/news/2024-06-satellite-megaconstellations-jeopardize-recovery-ozone.amp

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Meteors aren't made out of aluminum

Aluminium is an element, it's going to be present in meteors to the same extent it is on earth

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

That's not the comparison at all, the comparison is what the sattelites are made of (mostly aluminum) and what the meteors are made of (mostly other stuff, like earth).

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Is that a thing? Meteors content matching Earths?

load more comments (3 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

Hm, while the presence of the elements in question in the atmosphere could be naturally occurring, what's important to consider for this discussion is the rate of their increase. If there's an increase in the problematic particulate in the atmosphere that correlates with an increase in the atmospheric burn up of artificial satellites with no related increase in the rate of meteors, then its likely that the artificial satellites were indeed the culprit.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago

Wow. I read that as ozone laser and was super confused.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Of all the valid reasons to hate elon for, this is not one of them. The emissions from the entire world's satellite re-entries are basically nothing on an atmospheric scale.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

The article cite a peer-reviewed scientific paper paper which indicate satellites reentry has a significant effect.

Have you published (or know of) a better research paper that show this is incorrect?

the population of reentering satellites in 2022 caused a 29.5% increase of aluminum in the atmosphere above the natural level.

[..]

As aluminum oxide nanoparticles may remain in the atmosphere for decades, they can cause significant ozone depletion.

Source: Potential Ozone Depletion From Satellite Demise During Atmospheric Reentry in the Era of Mega-Constellations

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

There article is about a paper showing that there's a significant increase in aluminum oxide in the atmosphere. The particulates from that are part of how the small amounts of chlorine in the atmosphere are able to destroy ozone.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

I'll write Elong to stop on Twatter.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

I question the potentially sensationalist title. Why specifically target "Elon Musk"? Would it not be more accurate to pin the responsibility on the entirety of SpaceX? I could certainly be mistaken, but I feel that the decisions made at SpaceX are not only Elon's.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

And how do you know it's magnitudes higher if you haven't seen any studies taking it into consideration?

load more comments
view more: next ›