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

nature.com

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

#61

Post by laurent92 »

rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote: post #35
mjevans wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cheap option of going out of our way to do less (so we emit less) is very probably off the table at this point. As a species we need another plan. I like a mixed approach of sequestering atmospheric gasses via processes that synthesize useful compounds from the components we don't want in the air as well as hard scifi concepts like giant reflective surfaces in space. Throttling the quantity of sunlight by reflect…

Or we could go with the cheap option. If there’s anything that the global pandemic taught us, it is that nothing about human behavior is ever set in stone and there will always be a way to make even draconian policies like lockdowns and mandatory face masks politically viable. The billions we’d spend building the crazy ideas you suggested which also have no guarantee of success, could be channeled into whatever it ta…

I’ve burnt 12 cars after lockdowns to ensure that you don’t get the idea that climate lockdowns would be a nice solution after Covid lockdowns. My CO2 emissions now far outweigh (perhaps 10x) the base level, not to talk about the poor grandmas who can’t afford a new car.

Lockdowns are absolutely horrible. I don’t get why you don’t kill us directly, and pretend to do it for our health. Suicide, harm, family violence, just having a life with no leisure, no secret why solitary confinement is used as a means of torture in US prisons.

You just don’t have the stats yet, but the harm you have caused by choosing lockdowns is incommensurable. PLEASE build stats on well-being and how many hours-in-good-health were actually saved by lockdowns, and wait a few years for those studies to surface before concluding that lockdowns are a fine way to deal with a problem. Taking harm upon others may satisfy your feeling of dealing a problem, but the base problem, Covid, has not even been squashed, it spread in waves and became widespread and endemic anyway like doctors always said it would. Not - solved, but saddistic measures were taken against the weaker of us.

With global warming, I have no doubt you’ll crush our lives again without solving anything about global warming itself.

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

#62

Post by ajuc »

p1necone wrote: post #47
julienb_sea wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Watching climate change deniers periodically change up their bullshit because the old bullshit got too obviously wrong has been equal parts hilarious and frustrating. I guess now we're at the "okay okay fine, it's a problem, and humans are causing it. But we should still do nothing to fix it, because... China?" Screaming right past the acceptance stage and in for another loop of denial.

After that it will be "welp it's too late now".

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

#63

Post by selfhifive »

simion314 wrote: post #43
julienb_sea wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>China and India will not play ball. That is a lame excuse, mostly used by people from developed countries that are responsible for the issue, so you dodge responsibility and also try to put blame on the developing country why you are continuing screwing the environment. It is like you have a history of you and your ancestors abusing your children and you don't want to stop because the new neighbor is also abusing hi…

Quite frankly a lot of people in India and China don't even have the resources to generate emissions.

ACs, Refrigerators, and cars are still unavailable to the lower middle class. Even the middle class can only have 2 out of those 3.

A large chunk of public transport in the big cities in India and China is CNG and electric.

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

#65

Post by abc_lisper »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #29
gpt5 wrote: 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.

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 changin…

When it rains, Co2 in atmosphere leaches the calcium in rocks forming calcium carbonate that runs off to the sea eventually. Hundreds of millions of years from now, our actions leave their mark on some ancient seabed, as a thick white stone(like Dover, England) . The higher the Co2 in the atmosphere, the more it rains, because more water evaporates due to higher temperature, causing faster reduction of Co2 in the atmosphere. Thus there is a natural balance in the cycle. Unfortunately for us, it is way slower than the speed with which we pumped the Co2 out. It takes tens of millions of years to get back to preindustrial levels (of < 200 ppm) Co2

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

#67

Post by alex_sf »

simion314 wrote: post #43
julienb_sea wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>China and India will not play ball. That is a lame excuse, mostly used by people from developed countries that are responsible for the issue, so you dodge responsibility and also try to put blame on the developing country why you are continuing screwing the environment. It is like you have a history of you and your ancestors abusing your children and you don't want to stop because the new neighbor is also abusing hi…

> It is like you have a history of you and your ancestors abusing your children and you don't want to stop because the new neighbor is also abusing his children too

This is a poor metaphor. It's more akin to having a family history of child abuse, trying to stop the cycle, explaining to your neighbor why it's bad, and then your neighbor saying "well, your grandpa beat the shit out of your dad, so we get to beat our kids too!"

And of course, the largest producer of CO2 isn't the US as you imply, it's China.

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

#68

Post by gumby »

Note: I work at a startup working on removing methane from the atmosphere.

Responding to several comments: yes, we need to get rid of the excess CO2. In fact when CH4 is broken down (mostly via hydroxyl† or, over oceans, Cl reactions) you end up with CO2 anyway.

So, as you ask, why worry about CH4?

The radiative forcing function of CH4 is, depending on your baseline, 30-80X‡ worse than C02. The rise in methane levels from 750 ppbv to 1900 ppbv is believed to have raised the temperature by as much as 0.5 C. So eliminating it buys more time to work on other problems.

The second problem is you can't really eliminate* emissions -- they come from diverse sources, almost all of them natural. You can see this in that the 750 ppbv level that was reasonably flat before the widespread adoption of the steam engine (around 1775 when Watt and Boulton got their patent)** -- emission and oxidation/removal were roughly balanced. Another way to look at it is that 1900 ppbv today was all emitted over the last decade, whether "naturally" or not.

I put "naturally" in quotation marks because yes, some would be emitted anyway without humans, but most of the emissions that come from humans are from biological activity that would not otherwise have occurred: primarily agriculture, but also fossil fuel extraction. If we somehow stopped all the latter it would cut anthropogenic emission by perhaps a third; livestock maybe the same amount, or maybe half in aggregate. But you aren't going to stop growing crops or dumping stuff in landfill.

And many of these sources are quite diffuse; oilfields result in lots of seepage, and who can fit a catalytic converter to a swamp?

And of course methane bursts from melting tundra heating continental shelves and the like -- not sure anybody has an idea how much of that there is. You can see craters from these bursts if you walk around in the arctic. And as the article mentions, it's not just the frozen methane, but as the frozen tundra melts decomposition accelerates. One can imagine a significantly large offshore burst that could wipe out agriculture for a few years -- probably a bad thing if you are a fan of vertebrates.

If you want to know what human activity bugs me the most, its not livestock, it's a transition to natural gas (methane, basically) as a "greener" fuel for transport, heating and electricity generation. More gas means more leaks and emissions and further cooking of the planet. And when those ships have been launched and power plants built they'll be in operation for decades because of that's how long they'll take to depreciate. The EU has come out in favor of this; the IMO is encouraging shipping to make the transition, and of course some countries depend on its export.

PS: everyone makes cow fart jokes but a point of trivia: it's actually cow burps as the cow is a ruminant.

† For unknown reasons OH levels last year seem to have dropped. Eek!

‡ These calculations are arcane, depending on what parameters you're trying to compare. We just use 30X in the company.

* There are various projects to eradicate point sources: barns, landfills, some old mines. We need more of that too.

** OK, obviously some coal was burnt before the Boulton and Watt engine and adoption was not instantaneous but you can see the bend right around the end of the 18th century.

Edit: add the point about gas being considered a "green" fuel.

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

#69

Post by mtsr »

badgley wrote: post #42
gpt5 wrote: 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.

I think you're spot on in your observation. Reducing methane would help and definitely has its place, but CO₂ is a totally different beast. CO₂ is best thought of as a "stock pollutant" meaning that the more you have of it, the worse the effects. This follows directly from that fact that CO₂ sticks around in the atmosphere for millennia, increasing atmospheric radiative forcing. Methane, on the other hand, is better…

Except that as masklinn writes above, methane gets converted into CO2 and so over its full lifecycle is worse by about a factor of 25.

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

#70

Post by tsimionescu »

julienb_sea wrote: post #26
breakyerself wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

China and India are nothing compared to the US, if you look at the relevant metrics - emissions per capita. The US is emitting the same as China or near enough not to matter, but doing so at less than a third of the population. The comparison with India is even more one-sided.

Not to mention, much of China's emissions are actually coming from its factories supplying the US and Europe with goods. If we just give up on buying some of the goods, emissions will go down.

Finally, to call any measures on combatting climate change that were enacted anywhere in the world "overzealous" is laughable. The only measure stat can actually put a dent in the ever increasing temperatures are those that will come with economic contraction - not just stopping the growth, but actually downsize our economies for a decade or two - but this is completely unthinkable to liberals.

The best measures that are being taken today would have helped if they had been taken in the 1960s when the problem was first understood. Instead, we sacrificed the future for economic growth in the present, and are now doing minor improvements (wind and solar, electric cars) that will barely even reduce the rhythm at which emissions are increasing.

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