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Earth's clouds are shrinking, boosting global warming

(www.science.org)
157 points Helmut10001 | 2 comments | 05 Apr 25 12:08 UTC | HN request time: 0.01s | source
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kacesensitive ◴[05 Apr 25 13:16 UTC] No.43593217[source]▶
Earth gets over 170,000 terawatts of solar energy every day—10,000 times more than humanity uses. Losing just a fraction of our cloud cover means a massive, invisible throttle is coming off the climate system. If this trend holds, we’re not just warming—we’re stepping on the gas.
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amazingamazing ◴[05 Apr 25 13:50 UTC] No.43593530[source]▶
These types of comments are pointless. We are destroying the world. Ok. What’s the solution? All involve pain, but no one wants to talk about that. Tech isn’t going to solve it. For one, the kind of person on this site is contributing literally 10000x more to the issue than the worlds bottom, so we can start there.

People love tech solutions, because then they don’t have to stop consuming and live modestly.

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TheBigSalad ◴[05 Apr 25 13:59 UTC] No.43593606[source]▶
We could solve this problem in a few years with technology if we really wanted to.
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Y-bar ◴[05 Apr 25 14:10 UTC] No.43593676[source]▶
I'm not disagreeing, but we don't even need technology, all we need is the political will to truly stop subsidising fossil-based energy.

In the just over a minute it took me to read your comment and write this reply, the fossil industry received _another_ USD 14 Million: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/oct/06/fossil-f...

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1. thfuran ◴[05 Apr 25 14:59 UTC] No.43593993[source]▶
If we immediately stopped all CO2 and methane emissions, the problem wouldn't be solved. There's still more warming that's going to happen as a result of the past emissions.
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2. Y-bar ◴[05 Apr 25 15:08 UTC] No.43594057[source]▶
True. The warming we see today is from emissions years ago. The inertia is real.

But even if we would spend only the explicit subsidies we would have a trillion dollar each and every year to spend on things like carbon capture and other mitigations which are not dangerous large-scale geoengineering projects like cloud seeding.