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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

#81

Post by Johnny555 »

aero-glide2 wrote: post #46
throwawaysea wrote: post #34

Many humans. Rich life (individual freedoms and high material quality of life). Low environmental impact. Pick two. EDIT: this apparently is one of my most disliked comments. To clarify, my point is that we can’t have both unlimited population growth and a high quality of life without accepting environmental impacts. If a high population of people have to crowd into dense micro apartments and give up cars and face co…

4 : space colonies

If we can't live comfortably on earth (even with the worst expected effects from climate change), how can we live on another planet or in outer space which has a far less hospitable environment than any climate change could cause here on earth.

I think of space colonies as being protection from some catastrophic event on earth, not as an answer to climate change.

It's not like we could move significant numbers of people off the planet... and if we can build a spaceship or habitat on another planet that people can survive (and thrive) in, it would be much much easier to build the same habitat here on earth. I would bet that even building an underwater city would be much easier than a moon colony or orbiting space station.

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

#82

Post by guntars »

oivey wrote: post #45
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…

Creating “useful” compounds from atmospheric green house gasses isn’t some “have your cake and eat it, too” type thing. It is going to be extremely inefficient and expensive. Emitting less is still cheaper.

There’s research into self-replicating micro machines that could create useful compounds from atmospheric CO2 cheaply and efficiently.

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

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

#83

Post by it_does_follow »

misja111 wrote: post #75
philshem wrote: post #58

Here's a related, recent New Yorker article about the melting permafrost. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/17/the-great-sibe... https://archive.is/ZyhPf > Over thousands of years, the frozen earth swallowed up all manner of organic material, from tree stumps to woolly mammoths. As the permafrost thaws, microbes in the soil awaken and begin to feast on the defrosting biomass. It’s a funky, organic process, a…

But doesn't the article suggest that the recent rapid rise comes from methane produced by microbes? If this is true, it is not the melting permafrost, but (intensive) agriculture that is the culprit. > But since 2007, when methane levels began to rise more rapidly again, the proportion of methane containing 13C began to fall (see ‘The rise and fall of methane’). Some researchers believe that this suggests that much o…

Isn't the methane in permafrost produced by microbes? It's basically wet lands that ended up being frozen, and as they thaw they go back to releasing the methane being processed by the breakdown of organic matter from microbes.

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

#84

Post by twayt »

mistermann wrote: post #44
twayt wrote: post #4

Earlier 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

This would make for a good viral meme, how could something like that be pulled off in the real world I wonder?

It has to be done in secret, by purely good intentioned third party that has some sort of leverage over the people in power.

This group should have one sole purpose of dosing the people in power and otherwise not be allowed to have any further influence.

Until our selection mechanisms choose the purest intentioned people rather than expedient and selfish profiteers, the people in power will be driven to optimize objective functions that aren’t conducive for humanity. In the short term, the best way to fix this would be to reveal what is truly happening around them and force them to confront the consequences of their actions and lack thereof.

This is very different from the game they have become so familiar with and content with playing.

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

#85

Post by xscott »

tsimionescu wrote: post #70
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 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…

Emissions per capita is only relevant if you want to assign moral blame rather than solve the problem. Canada and Australia are higher per capita than the US [0], and you can demonize and crucify them all you want, but it doesn't stop more than 3% of the total problem.

Similarly, you can send every person in the US back to the stone age, and you're still going to have about 80% of the problem unless you can get other countries to join along.

[0] https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by...

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

#86

Post by nosianu »

To see both the longer trend (graph), a comparison with the value at the same time the previous year, and the current value for CO2, CH4, N2O, and SF6 I occasionally check the Global Monitoring Laboratory (NOAA):

https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends_ch4/

Link to methane, click on one of the four switched at the top for the others.

Warning: It always is pretty depressing to visit this site.

You can also check out a tab "Growth Rate", for CO2 for example it's https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/gr.html -- which is even more depressing. Even the rate(!) increases!

.

So, I'm mid-life, and I do what many might say is actually interesting and useful software work, no standard stuff, lots of new things to design and plan and implement in a small software company I co-founded in a team that works well together. Currently we do most of our work for the health sector. Still, I can't take it too seriously. I look at that data and I think to myself, in a few decades we will have problems, many indirectly from more and more troubled nations who will bear the brunt of the climate change, that that silly little piece of software I write seems meaningless if I start thinking about the bigger picture. I'm not demotivated or depressed, it's more the opposite, I can't feel excited about any achievements because I think that most of what we do, what people do these days, is just keeping busy to avoid facing the bigger reality. The show must go on. I've developed the feeling that what we have, even in the rich countries, is much more fragile than people realize.

Unless there is a full stop of digging up any more carbon from below ground, in the form of oil, gas, and coal, and I mean full stop and not just a reduction, the amount of carbon in the above ground carbon cycle is going to keep increasing. No amount of trees planted or most of he other measures proposed will change that. How likely is that to happen?

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

#88

Post by VBprogrammer »

nicbou wrote: post #53
rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The pandemic also told us that people won't even do something as mildly inconvenient as wearing a mask. Forget about major life changes.

I believe it also showed us the limit of individual action on climate change. It's doubtful I could have gotten 100% work from home out of my employers sans pandemic. My partner stopped going to work because her industry was on government provided life support.

Despite that CO2 emissions in 2020 dropped by 6%. A change which would be wiped out in a few years by the natural growth.

Getting individuals to do anything meaningful about climate change is like those people telling millennials to stop buying Starbucks and cancel Netflix in order to buy a home.

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

#89

Post by jillesvangurp »

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.

Depends on how much methane ends up in the atmosphere. A lot of methane released in a short time, could end up having very dramatic effects. For example, Siberian permafrost melting and releasing a lot of methane would probably have some measurable and dramatic, but short term effects. However, the addition of a couple of giga tons of methane released per year is not going to help slow that melting process down. If that's a process that lasts a few decades/centuries, it would raise methane levels more or less permanently throughout that period. It would recover once methane release stops/slows down.

We'd be looking at a very different planet by then with higher see levels, higher temperatures, and a lot less ice on Greenland, Antartica, and most mountains. You can haggle about just how bad things would get in terms of temperature rises, and sea level rises. But lets just say it wouldn't be very good. It would recover eventually. But the problem is that that recovery process is going to take thousands of years.

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

#90

Post by gumby »

spenczar5 wrote: post #73
gumby wrote: post #68

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…

This is pretty interesting/terrifying. Could you say more about the startup? At least its name?

Which is terrifying: the methane threat or that someone is addressing it?

We're in the stage of scaling up a process from lab scale to deployment scale. Most of the theoretical and experimental science in this area has been done at institutions in Germany, France and Denmark and while the company is international the engineering development is in SV.

TBH there's a lot more to do than just some engineering and validation: regulation, environmental studies, social acceptance, etc -- about as much as engineering itself.

The company is named Blue Dot Change (bluedotchange.com) -- trying to restore the planet to the lovely blue dot from the photos from space. Yes all startups ultimately need a new, less nerdly name. Right now the web site doesn't say much -- basically clip art and a little text.

Since this is HN:

- The architecture is nice: a large number of small devices, which allows a lot of scaling and all the other nice operational and cost features you'd expect (but no, no need for some sort of k8s to manage them :-).

- Yes, we're hiring: experienced ME, EE, and ChemE; in a few months we'll need a couple of more deep embedded/instrumentation programmers.

- And we are continuing to fundraise, by pre-selling carbon credits. Since we are making relatively small devices, we don't need one of those crazy $100MM rounds you'd need to develop a new kind of oil refinery or nuke. If we do decide we need that for some crazy phase of scaling we can to that then.

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