I planted about 50 fruit trees and bushes when I moved into my new place. I also converted the electric to 100% renewable. Other than dumping my natural gas heater I'm not sure what's left that I can do to help reduce climate change.
This is happening right now, it's not a future thing. We're dealing with it whether we want to or not.
Sadly, your natural gas heater is currently more carbon friendly than electric heat. In an interconnected grid, what you are using is probably offset by a mix of coal and gas generation, and to get to you it's suffering transmission loss. Solar hot water is a big win, though, especially if you are electric there. Same with insulation. Eat less meat. Repair vs replace.
Good luck to all of us.
edit: full disclosure, I replied to you without reading the article. I just read it. Holy shit. I wish there was someone that could comfort me that between ocean acidification, conveyor current shutdown, Greenland/Ross shelf based melting, threats to krill lifecycle, precipitation changes, and changes in farmland suitability (among others) ... we are looking at mass human die-offs over most people heres' lifetimes. When you look at the level of interconnection across the world, specialization, fragility of our complex systems... it's hard for me to not come up with a back of envelope figure ~6 billion deaths from starvation & conflict. Based on our resource extraction rate, it could easily make this the peak of human civilization.
> Livestock is responsible for 65% of all human-related emissions of nitrous oxide – a greenhouse gas with 296 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide, and which stays in the atmosphere for 150 years. -“Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options.” Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. 2006
[1] From this excellent documentary: http://www.cowspiracy.com/facts/
This proportion is also likely to go up significantly in the next 30 years. If you want to get a more visceral sense of that, try changing the "Diet" settings in this climate change mitigation model http://tool.globalcalculator.org/ . For more of an eye opener, change the "examples pathways" to IEA 6DS (current trends) and then just manipulate the "Type of meat" parameter. Simply by replacing 64% of expected ruminant consumption (beef, lamb etc.) with other meats (chicken, pork, etc.), we can decrease total worldwide emissions by 43%.
This estimate says that livestock contribute 14.5% of all anthropogenic greenhouse gasses: http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/197623/icode/
As far as opportunities to curb your own carbon footprint, use one of the calculators available on the web. For many people, jet airplane travel dominates the 'discretionary' portion of GHG pollution.
https://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/gases/n2o.ht...
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas:
"For example, the direct radiative effect of a mass of methane is about 72 times stronger than the same mass of carbon dioxide over a 20-year time frame[20] but it is present in much smaller concentrations so that its total direct radiative effect is smaller, in part due to its shorter atmospheric lifetime. On the other hand, in addition to its direct radiative impact, methane has a large, indirect radiative effect because it contributes to ozone formation. Shindell et al. (2005)[21] argue that the contribution to climate change from methane is at least double previous estimates as a result of this effect.[22]"
"Methane has an atmospheric lifetime of 12 ± 3 years. The 2007 IPCC report lists the GWP as 72 over a time scale of 20 years, 25 over 100 years and 7.6 over 500 years.[20] A 2014 analysis, however, states that although methane's initial impact is about 100 times greater than that of CO2, because of the shorter atmospheric lifetime, after six or seven decades, the impact of the two gases is about equal, and from then on methane's relative role continues to decline.[37] The decrease in GWP at longer times is because methane is degraded to water and CO2 through chemical reactions in the atmosphere."
Immediately following this last paragraph they show a table which says that carbon dioxide has a GWP (Global Warming Potential) of 1 over all time periods, while that of methane is 72 over 20 years, 25 over 100 years, and 7.6 over 500 years.
> If we where starting from zero then sure they would both have a large impact but they are both in sufficient quantities that lot's of them are breaking down making the future contribution have a negotiable net effect.
Maybe it's too early in the morning for me, but I don't understand the point you're trying to make here, and I am apparently not the only one. Care to clarify?
If cows add 1 unit per year and the source of that unit is ultimately CO2, then the cows aren't actually making things worse than they are now.
Those are both ways you can affect climate change.
Asking if someone supports politicians that claim to be eco-conscious while raising campaign money, who are almost universally left-leaning, is far from "neutral". There are places on the Internet to espouse political support for either side. This, however, is not one of them.
Someone proposed the rhetorical question of "what politicians do you support" as one of the "ways you can affect climate change". The poster is not saying "You should vote (in a particular way)", nor even generalizing what positions the respective parties take, just that voting affects climate policy, which affects climate. The poster literally only said "the way you vote affects the way climate is handled", and -you- are inferring a bias, and a political motivation, and crying foul.
By that logic, we can't talk about voting being a means to -any- end. "How can we prevent the TPP" "Vote out those in favor of it" "NO NO NO, POLITICAL COMMENTARY, GTFO!"
Talk of tearing the whole system down or whatever is totally acceptable, even if (or maybe precisely because) it's probably also unrealistic. However once a subject comes up where one group is basically wrong, it becomes a lot more difficult to talk about in a forum like this because some folks actually do have to justify their voting habits in the context of e.g. climate change, instead of all of us just kind of posting at each other "those politicians eh?" all day and getting very little actually done.
When it comes to a lot of tech issues, pretty much everyone in Washington is fucking awful and we can find consensus on that (with a few notable exceptions that show up in every thread to concern troll everyone else - not going to name names). However there is only one party in the US right now that is broadly sticking its fingers in its ears and screaming that climate change isn't happening.
Contrast this with a lot of tech issues, where you can throw up your hands and claim the whole system is fucked, and that both sides have their faults in roughly equal proportion. You're not forced to think about the consequences of supporting one party or the other as much.
Environmentally friendly legislation can be a bit more diverse but that doesn't really exist now, emissions is all people discuss.
Historically, the Republican Party gave us the National Park System and the Clean Air Act, and Soviet officials thought green air around factories was a sign of progress.
Especially as China and other countries continue eating more meat at higher and higher rates.
Additionally, something has to ship all that food to the cows.
But you're missing the fact that some of the CO2 captured by the grass is farted by the cows as methane, CH4.
About 1% of the CO2 is released as CH4.
CH4 is about 25 times more potent as a greenhouse gas. It's one of the most potent greenhouse gases.
Luckily methane has a half life of 7 years in the atmosphere, so anything we do to reduce methane emissions is likely to be helpful.
True, and they are probably at least a small net flow into the atmosphere. But:
"There are hundreds of millions of cows (and other livestock) that did not exist before."
... that part doesn't matter: agriculture is by nature carbon-neutral (except if you count mechanization aspects like fertilizers + fuel).
I've known climate-change deniers. They hold on to their political-economic religion as it literally destroys their world. And they're not the worst. The worst are the enablers, who often call themselves "moderates".
It's virtually impossible to move forward without fully acknowledging this fact.