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Scientists raise alarm over ‘dangerously fast’ growth in atmospheric methane
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Re: Scientists raise alarm over ‘dangerously fast’ growth in atmospheric methane
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It’s not for a lack of intention though. Lack of critical thinking and maybe justifying the cost? Yes. But in general it seems to be the fastest route to making people realize that they are not more important than the whole.
Re: Scientists raise alarm over ‘dangerously fast’ growth in atmospheric methane
#23Quoted post unavailable.
not enough we have to die and launch our bodies into space
Re: Scientists raise alarm over ‘dangerously fast’ growth in atmospheric methane
#24Earlier 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?
Doesn't methane eventually break down into carbon dioxide? If it does then it's much worse than just being co2 in the first place.
Re: Scientists raise alarm over ‘dangerously fast’ growth in atmospheric methane
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> the "current outlook" section
from the article:
> according to data released in January by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
an encyclopedia like Wikipedia is, by its very nature, going to lag behind the cutting edge of published research on this topic.
this article might eventually become a source cited in an edit to the Wikipedia page for that "current outlook" section.
Re: Scientists raise alarm over ‘dangerously fast’ growth in atmospheric methane
#26Genuinely 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…
Alternatively, attempting to curtail human emissions to some arbitrary level will, unquestionably, have drastic impact on human quality of life worldwide and the impact will be particularly acute on the developing world and those in poverty in the developed world.
Large, influential emitters like China and India will not play ball. As such, the climate experiment will inevitably continue unabated, despite any of the self-damaging choices made by the developed world.
Additionally, our ability to actually combat the acute impacts of climate change (i.e. construction of flood barriers, land reclamation, movement of people out of flood-prone areas) could easily be actively hampered by overzealous limits on human development associated with attempt to reduce emissions. In other words, this is a nuanced issue and we have little choice but to press onwards.
Re: Scientists raise alarm over ‘dangerously fast’ growth in atmospheric methane
#27Genuinely 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.
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Re: Scientists raise alarm over ‘dangerously fast’ growth in atmospheric methane
#28Based on the past two years, good luck with that. Wonder how much damage the billions of gallons of off gassing is costing the country and world from the Bakken fracking fields (North Dakota, eastern Montana) https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/at-night-giant-fie...
It seems more like this is the "clathrate gun" hypothesis coming to fruition.
Re: Scientists raise alarm over ‘dangerously fast’ growth in atmospheric methane
#29Genuinely 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.
I hadn't thought of carbon emissions in terms of half lives before. I thought that carbon emissions (presumably from fossil fuels) were more of a permanent change.
The carbon used to be deep underground, and now it's in the atmosphere. Where does half of it go? I know that it ends up as part of a photosynthetic organism, but then later that plant decays and its back in the atmosphere again, right?
And given a changing climate, can we rely on the atmosphere->plant rate remaining constant for enough for our ideas about the half lives of various greenhouse gasses to remain relevant?
Re: Scientists raise alarm over ‘dangerously fast’ growth in atmospheric methane
#30Genuinely 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.
Methane is CH4. It decays to CO2 + 2 H2O.
So as long as it’s methane it’s hundreds of times worse than CO2, then it becomes the same as co2[0]. Never better.
Which is why despite a short half life it has a global warming potential of ~25 over 100 years (Co2 is 1).
Then you also have the issue that even if it’s short (relatively, it takes multiples of the half-life to really taper off) for that duration your GW effect really shoots up, which tends not to be a good thing, 120 years is already quite short for biological systems to adapt, 10 is basically infeasible.
[0] actually a bit worse still as 1t ch4 yields 2.7t co2 and gwp is mass-relative