this post was submitted on 21 Dec 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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AI chatbots share climate disinformation to susceptible users (globalwitness.org)
submitted 6 days ago by silence7@slrpnk.net to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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[โ€“] Caribou@slrpnk.net 4 points 6 days ago

I knew Grok is awful and was going to recommend the worst climate deniers as the world's leading sources in climate change, but the subsection of the article called 'Grok promoted the use of outrage to increase virality of content about climate' is actually insane. They feed users misinformation and then draft up a post for them to share, but not before asking if they need help adding violent imagery or emotional outrage to the post first. Disgusting.

[โ€“] perestroika@slrpnk.net 3 points 6 days ago

Chatbots have a built-in tendency for sycophancy - to affirm the user and sound supportive, at the cost of remaining truthful.

ChatGPT went through its sycophancy scandal recently and I would have hoped they'd have added weight to finding credible and factual sources, but apparently they haven't.

To be honest, I'm rather surprised that Meta AI didn't exhibit much sycophancy. Perhaps they're simply somewhat behind the others in their customization curve - an language model can't be sycophant if it can't figure out the biases of its user or remember them until the relevant prompt.

Grok, being a creation of a company owned by Elon Musk, has quite predictably been "softened up" the most - to cater to the remaining user base of Twitter. I would expect the ability of Grok to present an unbiased and factual opinion degrade further in the future.

Overall, my rather limited personal experience with LLMs suggests that most language models will happily lie to you, unless you ask very carefully. They're only language models, not reality models after all.