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Scientists raise alarm over ‘dangerously fast’ growth in atmospheric methane

nature.com

11–20 of 164 posts

Re: Scientists raise alarm over ‘dangerously fast’ growth in atmospheric methane

#12
post #5

Genuinely curious - while Methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas, isn’t its half life in the atmosphere only 9 years? Wouldn’t this make it far less concerning than CO2 with its half life of 120 years? Looking for serious answers.

Clathrate Gun

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis

Re: Scientists raise alarm over ‘dangerously fast’ growth in atmospheric methane

#13
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Methane has ~25 times the global warming effect as an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide. Source: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/understanding-global-warmin...

So methane should be 25 / (120 / 9) = 1.875 times as harmful as CO2 in the long run? How much does the long run matter in this case?

The GWP is computed for a period of 100 years to account for the various half-lives. The 25x figure is normalized over a 100 year period.

Over a 20 year period, it is about 85x more harmful

Re: Scientists raise alarm over ‘dangerously fast’ growth in atmospheric methane

#16
post #5

Genuinely curious - while Methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas, isn’t its half life in the atmosphere only 9 years? Wouldn’t this make it far less concerning than CO2 with its half life of 120 years? Looking for serious answers.

A couple things.

First is that we are on track to overshoot the goal of limiting warming to 1.5C. It's now more a question of how much we are going to blow past 1.5C. Every bit counts now and a pulse of very potent greenhouse gasses at this time is very unhelpful.

2. There could be tipping points that aren't predictable. Methane may temporarily add a small increase to the global average temps, but could end up being the difference for whether permafrost melt begins releasing large amounts of co2 and even more methane that take us up to some even higher temperatire equilibrium.

Global warming is a massive unplanned, uncontrolled experiment with the thermal and chemical properties of the only biosphere we know of. The sooner we stop that experiment the safer humanity will be overall.

Re: Scientists raise alarm over ‘dangerously fast’ growth in atmospheric methane

#18
post #4
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much. We're definitely gonna fail to do anything significant about any of this crap until it forcibly ends the way everyone actually lives their lives.

It’s time to mandate a law that requires people in power to take a heroic dose of mushrooms twice a year

Heroic doses of psychedelics don't seem to prevent Burners from participating in the most absurd gratuitous waste of resources that is every BM event. I'm afraid it's not a panacea.

Re: Scientists raise alarm over ‘dangerously fast’ growth in atmospheric methane

#20
post #5

Genuinely curious - while Methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas, isn’t its half life in the atmosphere only 9 years? Wouldn’t this make it far less concerning than CO2 with its half life of 120 years? Looking for serious answers.

Clathrate Gun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis

Note the "current outlook" section, where the TL;DR: is that this is not happening and there is pretty good reason to believe it won't over predictable time-frames.
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