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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

#91

Post by gumby »

hendler wrote: post #74
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…

What is the startup removing Methane? (sorry if I missed it in your profile)

Yes my profile is somewhat geriatric. The company is Blue Dot Change and there is more about it in a reply to a parallel comment to yours.

edit: I just looked at my profile and it appears not to have been updated since I created my account

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

#92

Post by DanHulton »

mjevans wrote: post #31
istorical wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Carbon emissions are correlated to human activity. We can dial them up or down theoretically through human action. Methane emission through permafrost (both land and submarine) could end up as a cascading natural emission that forms a feedback loop. I think that's a big part of why people are panicking.

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…

Honestly, at this point, we need to be doing BOTH and to such a degree that it feels painful. We need to cut our global energy use massively to slow the runaway acceleration, and we need carbon capture solutions, ridiculous sci-fi mirror solutions, pretty much all of it, to get it back under control. And even then, we're going to have quite a few years of fucked-up weather worse than this.

The problem is, I despair of us doing EITHER, and "quite a few years of fucked-up weather" is going to sound like a fantasy story.

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

#93

Post by gumby »

Brajeshwar wrote: post #32

Climate Scientist, Ilissa Ocko[1], talked about Methane and Climate Change last month at a TED Talk. The video is worth watching - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlWuP7wESZw 1. https://www.ilissaocko.com

BTW she works for the Environmental Defense Fund who will soon be launching a satellite to measure methane (funded by a $100MM grant from Bezos). Despite giving a TED talk she's a serious scientist.

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

#94

Post by ShiftedClock »

evil-olive wrote: post #55
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.

the answer, or part of it, lies with methane clathrate [0] > a large amount of methane is trapped within a crystal structure of water, forming a solid similar to ice. Originally thought to occur only in the outer regions of the Solar System, where temperatures are low and water ice is common, significant deposits of methane clathrate have been found under sediments on the ocean floors of the Earth. deposits of solid…

Thank you very much for the links, I couldn't believe the original article didn't mention methane clathrate at all.

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

#95

Post by rvense »

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…

> Large, influential emitters like China and India will not play ball.

This is not true. We are all in the same frying pan and I don't know why people keep insisting that the others don't understand it. Of course they do. They have political pressures from industrialists and deniers just as we do here that might prevent immediate action, but they are not fundamentally different. Quite the opposite.

Either way, why do we have to wait for others to move first. We know there's a problem, we know there are solutions, get to it.

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

#96

Post by rad_gruchalski »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #88
nicbou wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

> A change which would be wiped out in a few years by the natural growth.

That’s the elephant in the room.

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

#97

Post by rjknight »

fsloth wrote: post #54

Uh oh, time to prepare to spray sulphur particles to upper atmosphere?

To add to this a bit: if increased atmospheric heat is _causing_ the release of greenhouse gases, then directly reducing the temperature of the atmosphere might be the only way to slow down that release. Secondly, since there is a positive feedback loop here, the earlier and more decisively we act to directly reduce the temperature, the less such geoengineering we will need to do. Right now we only need to counteract X parts per million of methane in the atmosphere, but in the future we would need to counteract X+Y parts per million, necessitating a bigger geoengineering response.

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

#99

Post by Brajeshwar »

gumby wrote: post #93
Brajeshwar wrote: post #32

Climate Scientist, Ilissa Ocko[1], talked about Methane and Climate Change last month at a TED Talk. The video is worth watching - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlWuP7wESZw 1. https://www.ilissaocko.com

BTW she works for the Environmental Defense Fund who will soon be launching a satellite to measure methane (funded by a $100MM grant from Bezos). Despite giving a TED talk she's a serious scientist.

"Despite giving a TED talk she's a serious scientist."

I was actually trying to edit my comment to hone in the fact that the video is a good one despite being on TED. ;-)

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

#100

Post by gumby »

omgitsabird wrote: post #78
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…

Speaking of diffuse, how do you sequester something that is at super low concentrations like atmospheric methane? As an analogy, my home reverse osmosis filter doesn't even come close to touching things that are in the parts per billion. Also, it isn't as if atmospheric methane is evenly distributed across the globe [0]. How do you expect to collect methane across borders? [0] - https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4798

Actually CH4 is pretty well distributed, especially in the northern hemisphere . The pictures / videos you linked to were emissions pictures. We have some good concentration maps we generated from from the ESA Copernicus Tropomi data. I don't know how to link to those internal pictures, but you can probably find similar images right on an ESA site or one of the university sites that use the data.

As for concentration: that's an excellent question. I'm not sure how much I should say right now (though as soon as some of the scientists appear on our website it'll be obvious from their publication record, if the comms "team" -- really just part of one person -- hasn't already written more by then). I can tell you that the lab work we are scaling up just used outside air -- a pipe stuck out the window -- as its air source, not some special high concentration mixture made in the lab.

I believe you can buy home water filters that extract higher molecular weight contaminants like arsenic in low ppb levels, but I'm not sure how applicable that really is :-)

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