Methane may not warm the Earth quite as much as previously thought

> if a scientist questions climate science, he becomes a pariah

As a climate scientist myself, I can tell you this is untrue and a harmful legend. As climate science is mostly atmospheric physics, biology and chemistry, it's pretty much very easy to disagree with anyone if you have a good argument supported by data. If you have strong scientific arguments, it does not matter even if the whole world is against you. On the contrary, this will likely make you famous and secure your career. Scientists (at least the curios ones) love to be proven wrong.

EDIT: spelling

Fortunately, there are other means of fertilising. Green manures - generally annual legumes - are a good option. The difficulty is that this, and other organic approaches to fertilising and structuring soil, require a proportion of land to be allowed to lie fallow for a while.

In other words, fertilising the soil with fossil fuel derived products is just.. more profitable.

The solution is probably carbon pricing of some kind for fertilisers: the cost of organic farming needs to be roughly the same. Agricultural subsidies are already enormous, so some of them could be directed to food prices directly, to ease the transition for consumers.

> Ok, so let's stop using fossil oils and animal agriculture (let's ignore human farts for a moment).

> How could that be detrimental for human flourishing, I ask? Are the burgers essential for humans to flourish? I don't think so.

Disclaimer: I decided to interpret the comment as disagreeing with me because it seemed like the most plausible interpretation giving the ambiguous potential use of sarcasm, but it's very possible I misinterpreted.

The burgers and the farts were an attempt at humor.

A much more serious consideration (also in my original) is heating our homes. If you have ever been homeless longer than a day or two during cold months in a cold place (I spent 6 months this way), you pretty quickly learn how important modern climate controls are. I don't see how you can "fluorish" when you're freezing your ass off. Good luck getting the sleep you need to perform either physical or mental work, which currently is needed in order to fluorish (unless you think the homeless on the street are fluorishing). If you're lucky your employer will be able to heat their office so you could live there, but not everybody works for someone like that. The wealthy would be able to buy whatever they needed (electric heaters, solar panels, battery storage, the high labor costs of retrofitting all these things, assuming these are even still available after the long chain of dependency is broken) but the vast majority of people would not. Human fluorishing is not just comfort for the wealthy. The average person's life matters. Much of what advances our human condition come from people who aren't born into wealth.

How exactly do you propose to heat the average person's home when all fossil fuels are no longer available? And any derivative products of fossil fuels such as plastics? Keep in mind even bio-plastics made from corn and other products would not be nearly as available since we would lose orders of magnitude of production capacity by no longer being able to use fertilizers, tractors and other machinery, etc.

I guess we should probably establish what "human fluorishing" even means otherwise this discussion is pointless. If your idea of human fluorishing is where a massive perecentage of human labor is doing farm work again like in the 19th century, or going back to feudalism where we all work the Lord's land and pick his crops. My definition is where human quality and standard of life continually increases. We're not perfect right now (especially with life expectancies in the US dropping) but our current situation would look like a future paradise compared to what we'd have without any fossil fuel.

Cutting CH4 is useful for fighting climate change, but in a different way than cutting CO2.

In terms of climate change it’s not a 10 years thing and then methane instantly swaps, it’s a second by second thing where a percentage of existing methane is constantly converted. In steady state new methane from say cow farts 1:1 replaces methane from past cow farts being transformed into CO2. The only difference is an atom of CH4 at 16.043 grams per mol weigh less than an atom of CO2 at 44.009 grams per mol. Though many sources of CH4 start by extracting atmospheric CO2, natural gas leaks don’t.

The critical difference is if we cut net CO2 and hold methane steady the atmosphere stops warming, where cutting methane and CO2 would actually cool the atmosphere.

Put another way NEW sources of methane are different because it takes multiple years to reach an equilibrium. In the first years they have a very big impact, but eventually it falls off until eventually a constant source of CO2 may actually have a larger impact.

And you don't think the FAO reports that are most often quoted (Livestock's long shadow, and Tackling climate change through livestock) didn't take the biogenic carbon cycle into account?

Come on.