this post was submitted on 20 Oct 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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The coal industry is collapsing (www.forbes.com)
submitted 4 days ago by rimu@piefed.social to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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[–] Triumph@fedia.io 2 points 2 days ago

Right up front, I want to sincerely thank you for insisting that I back up my claims. Not kidding, not internet sarcasm; I truly appreciate it.

Let's take a look here.

According to Wikipedia, at Chernobyl:

An early estimate for total nuclear fuel material released to the environment was 3±1.5%; this was later revised to 3.5±0.5%. This corresponds to the atmospheric emission of 6 tonnes (5.9 long tons; 6.6 short tons) of fragmented fuel.

Data on Fukushima is more difficult to find, but the World Nuclear Association estimates that:

The 770 PBq figure is about 15% of the Chernobyl release of 5200 PBq iodine-131 equivalent.

While there remains uncertainty about the amount of radioactive material released from Fukushima, it's certainly below half of what Chernobyl produced.

From the earlier posted link about coal power plants:

[E]very [coal power] station creates fly ash containing around 5-10 tonnes of uranium and thorium each year.

Now, I totally get that the kind of radioactive materials released by a nuclear accident are different from what comes out of coal plants, and that a concetrated release is more dire than a diluted one - but given that there are ~2500 coal-fired power plants in the world, that means that coal plants produce about 12,500 to 25,000 tons of radiactive material every year.

If what is certainly the worst nuclear disaster produced just 6 tons, I believe that "including accidents" is not inaccurate.