Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

sciencenews.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 450 posts

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

#141

Post by myshpa »

freedomben wrote: post #126
myshpa wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(ChatGPT) There are several human sources of methane, including: - Livestock farming: Methane is produced during the digestive process of ruminant animals such as cows, sheep, and goats. Therefore, animal agriculture is a significant contributor to methane emissions. - Energy production: Methane is the primary component of natural gas, which is commonly used for heating and electricity generation. Methane can also be…

> 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…

> How exactly do you propose to heat the average person's home when all fossil fuels are no longer available

Atom & renewable sources. 256x256 km of solar panels is enough for whole world.

> And any derivative products of fossil fuels such as plastics

You mean trash (99% of plastics produced)? Stop producing it.

> fertilizers

Use regenerative agriculture. Agriculture can perfectly well function without fossil fuel inputs.

> tractors and other machinery

Electric tractors. Should have been here decades ago.

> your idea of human fluorishing is where a massive perecentage of human labor is doing farm work again like in the 19th century

Maybe we shouldn't insist on 70+ % of workers working bullshit jobs, and let instead few of them work in agriculture instead. Many would like it, if they could support themselves with it.

It's only because of the exploitation of the soil, natural resources and humans, that current agricultural practices prevail. If it would mean that our food production would not be dependent on use of poisons, i think that would be good thing for everybody.

> fluorishing

Humour?

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

#142

Post by throwaway09223 »

least wrote: post #114
throwaway09223 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but the problem is that meat consumes approximately 25 plant calories to produce 1 meat calorie. It's a reducing function, which means calorie for calorie meat produces 25 times as much greenhouse gas simply from the costs involved in plant production. This isn't universally true - some meat is grown by grazing "free" plant calories. But it is true for grain fed cattle -- for most US industrial meat production.…

> Yes, but the problem is that meat consumes approximately 25 plant calories to produce 1 meat calorie. Why is this a problem? Animals also produce higher quality protein with higher bioavailability, have a better amino acid profile that better suits what humans require, and provide nutrients that people cannot get from plants. That's on top of the fact that a lot of those plant calories aren't even consumable by hum…

> "Why is this a problem?"

It's a problem because of the aforementioned disproportionate energy consumption.

> "Animals also produce higher quality protein with higher bioavailability"

Hey look, you don't have to pitch me on meat -- I'm basically a carnivore. Personal preferences don't change the underlying engineering dynamics.

> "and provide nutrients that people cannot get from plants."

I love meat and I'll defend it as stridently as anyone, but this just isn't a rational argument. I want meat in my diet, but I do not require it to live. There are many ways to achieve a balanced diet either with other animal products, or without meat altogether.

The really weird thing about diet is that many (most?) of calories a typical American consumes are in excess of a healthy amount and are hurting us rather than helping us. It's a very strange dynamic, because the vast majority of Americans suffer from excess nutrition -- not malnutrition.

These excesses not only hurt our health, they harm the environment. Fat people create far more greenhouse gasses per capita than thin people. I eat meat, but I also eat healthy portions -- which puts me far ahead of most people regardless of their diet in terms of the resulting carbon footprint.

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

#143

Post by hkt »

sbaiddn wrote: post #93
myshpa wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> climate in 2023 is not significantly different than the climate in 2005 'Devastating' melt of Greenland, Antarctic ice sheets found https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35657570 This was here just yesterday. You may not feel it "on your own skin", but Earth does. And what exactly will happen when we'll lose all ice, we simply do not know. We just know it won't be pretty. > stopping all methane emitting activities w…

The Earth doesn't feel anything because it is not sentient. Anthropomorphizing topics causes us to treat them emotionally. The OP has an excellent point which you didn't address them: most methane in the atmosphere is from natural causes. When the amount due to humans is removed, the effect on heating is not very significant in comparison of our CO2 emissions . Stated another way, the OP is warning against premature…

If we're seeking to halt climate change, it seems quite reasonable to look at effective measures for that. If decreasing methane emissions from landfill or farming might contribute, it seems odd to write those things off. This is partly due to the way we silo investment in the west: there isn't an organisation that is a single point of coordination and can make the tradeoffs logically. So for better or worse, we should try to make those tradeoffs wherever we can.

To riff off your programming analogy, climate action is like a program that requires a thousand complicated, interdependent functions to be written for it to do its job. Unfortunately in our analogy, virtually none of them ever speak to one another, so the process will be hard, some people will try to bypass other people's contributions - even if they're better - for want of understanding, and the whole thing will be an organic mess.

The difference is, if the program doesn't do what it says, that's kind of fine. If we don't meet or exceed carbon goals, many people around the world are likely to die.

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

#144

Post by xyzzyz »

revelio wrote: post #132
myshpa wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> climate in 2023 is not significantly different than the climate in 2005 'Devastating' melt of Greenland, Antarctic ice sheets found https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35657570 This was here just yesterday. You may not feel it "on your own skin", but Earth does. And what exactly will happen when we'll lose all ice, we simply do not know. We just know it won't be pretty. > stopping all methane emitting activities w…

Antarctic sea ice extent is currently at the same level it was at this time of year in 1980, actually a little higher. Use Charctic to see for yourself: https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-... Arctic sea ice extent is currently tracking the 2010-2020 average. Nothing much is happening in terms of Arctic sea ice extent at the moment and that's been true for a while. There has been a steady decl…

What an outstanding comment. You put much more effort in it than the person you replied to really deserved.

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

#145

Post by hkt »

mlyle wrote: post #72
djleni wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you explain further? How does: > reducing methane emissions won't change a thing, compared to CO2 emissions. Follow from: > once methane emissions reach a steady level

If you release the same amount of methane per year for a couple dozen years, the methane reaches a steady state where it has a constant value, but CO2 continues to rise. This is because the methane is being converted to CO2 at a relatively quick clip. The timescale for CO2 is larger-- centuries.

Methane - CH4 - degrades to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. A quick clip, however, it is not: it can take 20 years, during which that single carbon atom yields 20x the global warming potential as part of a methane molecule than it does as part of a carbon dioxide molecule.

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

#146

Post by myshpa »

xyzzyz wrote: post #134
myshpa wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(ChatGPT) There are several human sources of methane, including: - Livestock farming: Methane is produced during the digestive process of ruminant animals such as cows, sheep, and goats. Therefore, animal agriculture is a significant contributor to methane emissions. - Energy production: Methane is the primary component of natural gas, which is commonly used for heating and electricity generation. Methane can also be…

Yes, eating meat is essential to flourishing of overwhelming majority of humans. Most humans, as they become wealthier, increase their meat consumption. This is very consistent across the world. If you forced humans to stop eating meat, this would make billions of people very unhappy. Benefits of burning fossil fuels are extremely obvious, so I shouldn’t even need to list these — for one thing, they make the discussi…

> If you forced humans to stop eating meat, this would make billions of people very unhappy.

Wealthy billions. The poor ones don't eat as much meat and dairy. And it's a good thing ... if they did, we would need not one, but 4-5 Earths to feed everyone.

Eating meat is a culture. A story we tell ourselves. It cost us all of megafauna, half of our forests, it threatens thousands of animal species with extinction, and it should go. It can't go for much longer if we want to have any future.

> Higher cost of energy

Costs are human construct. Money is just a record in someone's database. Goverments can make as much as they want. It means nothing.

> necessarily means we get to spend less on other things

We will learn what has value when we'll eat the system to the ground.

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

#147

Post by kalium-xyz »

pfdietz wrote: post #140
briantakita wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solar panels & batteries are also made of toxic material. Mining & the material breakdown of these materials spead these toxins to the land they are deployed on. Much of this material is also unethically mined. Children are coerced to mine some of this material. I hate to be the bearer of bad news. You may be able to downvote this comment but you cannot downvote reality.

What toxic material are x-Si panels made of?

Small amounts of cadmium and lead. Honestly you should not focus on that the batteries are the one that a legit argument is for imho. I’ve looked into why solar panels degrade over time and it’s mostly them physically being destroyed. The uv degradation happens very quickly and so isn’t gonna further ruin the panels output after its already been exposed a bit

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

#148

Post by revelio »

kagakuninja wrote: post #139
shrubble wrote: post #40

This is exactly what the "deniers" have been saying - that the mathematical model is not fleshed out enough, and the data is not present in sufficiently accurate quantity, for the climate models to be accurate. This research shows that the mechanism of action was misunderstood all this time. What else hasn't been researched enough and has simplistic assumptions baked into the climate models? That shockingly simplisti…

The fossil fuel industry has also grossly underestimated the amount of methane leaking from wells and fracking sites. Researchers got some things right, other things wrong. What we have seen historically is that the pessimistic estimates of scientists have matched reality better than the optimistic estimates. Scientists have actually under estimated the effects of climate change.

Scientists overestimated climate change and frequently still do by their own telling.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01192-2

Climate simulations: recognize the ‘hot model’ problem

Users beware: a subset of the newest generation of models are ‘too hot’ and project climate warming in response to carbon dioxide emissions that might be larger than that supported by other evidence.

In recent studies, the “hot models” have even been shown to be ineffective at reproducing past temperatures, a common method used to test their reliability and accuracy. This has cast further doubt on the model democracy approach, whereby all models are given equal weighting when establishing future warming parameters.

(unpaywalled copy here https://www.masterresource.org/uncategorized/climate-models-...)

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

#149

Post by replygirl »

halfjoking wrote: post #131
replygirl wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relative to what things looked like 10-20 years ago, is there still a meaningful contingent of climate change deniers? As far as I can tell, most of those people have accepted the reality but disagree on how we should approach it. Even in the most extreme case--looking at Republicans in the US Congress, steeped in fossil propaganda and owing many of their elections to gerrymandering--and using a broad definition of c…

There are a shitload of climate deniers. Maybe you never heard that Bill Gates is going to have “climate lockdowns” after covid, or “control the food supply.” But among half the voting population this is a common belief.

The data disagree: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/18/for-earth...

The most extreme voices are always amplified. In one corner we have people raising alarms over hypothetical ecofascism (misdirecting awareness of the real threat of increasing and increasingly-corporatized authoritarianism); in another we have people pushing for carbon capture methods that could create the next global public health crisis (https://www.vesta.earth/approach -> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8609536/ ); in another we have people who want to build reservoirs with nukes; in another we have people like me who want to see NAWAPA happen despite all the ecological risks and expected archeological + cultural losses. There are plenty of circles like this and none of them are even a plurality

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

#150

Post by WheatMillington »

orev wrote: post #59
machina_ex_deus wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Methane naturally turns into CO2 in the atmosphere. Even if it did increase warming more than CO2, once methane emissions reach a steady level, reducing methane emissions won't change a thing, compared to CO2 emissions. This is also similar to meat production emissions. Most of carbon emissions in meat productions are of carbon which was captured from the air as a part of the production cycle, by the plants which fee…

Plants that feed the cattle are overwhelmingly fertilized using fertilizer derived from petroleum products, so it’s not an accurate picture that the feed plants are carbon capture methods.

Carbon in plants comes exclusively from air, not from fertiliser.
Post reply on HN