Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t understand this logic or the wording. Methane = increase in Co2 Reducing methane = no effect But reducing Co2 yes? Why wouldn’t reducing methane change anything? Following your logic reducing Methane is reducing Co2, no?
The argument is that there is a set quantity of co2/methane in circulation. The meat industry supposedly isn't increasing the amount on a yearly basis. By that logic the only climate change relevant source of greenhouse gases are ones that introduce new ones into the circle, which is pretty much only burning fossil fuel. It's a pretty old argument that holds some truth, (the fossil fuels are the biggest issue) but is…
Methane may not warm the Earth quite as much as previously thought
251–260 of 450 posts
Re: Methane may not warm the Earth quite as much as previously thought
#252Earlier 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…
You make a good point about animal-based carbon emissions being a closed loop, but I don't think your conclusion that this loop doesn't accelerate the greenhouse effect is correct. Methane degrades to C02 in 1-1 proportion. So at any time, if more atmospheric carbon is concentrated as methane than as C02 then the greenhouse effect will be stronger at that time (because methane is a stronger GHG). If agriculture remov…
It's not like mammalian herbivores are a recent invention. If a constant amount of mammalian herbivores in the world would cause a constant acceleration of greenhouse effect then the greenhouse effect would have increased exponentially for millions of years already. That has not been the case.
If you increase the number of mammalian herbivores in the world then the greenhouse effect will increase for about a decade because of increasing levels of methane. After a decade, the methane level (and therefore the greenhouse effect) will have found a new (higher) equilibrium and no longer increase.
Re: Methane may not warm the Earth quite as much as previously thought
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
Climate has changed in big ways without mass extinctions. The medieval warm period, the little ice age, mid-20th-century cooling. Just three examples. The idea the climate has been stable since the dinosaurs isn't supported by the evidence.
Like all the variations you mentionned are less than 0.5° average, while we are already over 1° now. I think it's almost disengenuous to use them to say that the present warming is nothing to be worried of.
Re: Methane may not warm the Earth quite as much as previously thought
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here's a public versions of their nature comment written by the same authors. I should have linked to that instead of the original paywalled version but all these versions are making the same argument, presumably with sightly different wording for copyright reasons: https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-how-climate-scientist... If you're claiming this material is "climate change isn't real" then look into who the au…
Alright so the ipcc makes multiple projections, with some being "hot", in the sense that they are worse than their other predictions. I think they made like 6 predictions last report. This papers is just arguing that the "hot" predictions should be less intense, because they are not very good at reproducing some specific past dataset. That has nothing to do with a problem with hot models - it's a slight modification…
Re: Methane may not warm the Earth quite as much as previously thought
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
AVHRR started collecting data in the early 1980s, not the early 70s. ChatGPT is hallucinating again. I guess this is the scenario AI ethics people feared - the internet being clogged up by AI generated misinformation. If you want to take part in this debate do you own research and cite actual data. Polar bears are doing fine, by the way. https://polarbearscience.com/2023/02/23/published-field-stud...
It seems that AVHRR was launched in 1978 [0], with fairly continuous global coverage since June 1979 [1]. So it was not in early 1970s, it was in the late 1970s, and it was not in early 1980s. You both were pretty close. > Polar bears are doing fine, by the way. Good to hear. For now at least. If true. "In 2004, biologists discovered four drowned polar bears in the Beaufort Sea. Never before observed, biologists attr…
"AVHRR data have been collected continuously since 1981"
ChatGPT was off by a decade!
I hope nobody will confuse an anecdote about a handful of bears from 2004 with robust science.
Re: Methane may not warm the Earth quite as much as previously thought
#256Re: Methane may not warm the Earth quite as much as previously thought
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
Climate has changed in big ways without mass extinctions. The medieval warm period, the little ice age, mid-20th-century cooling. Just three examples. The idea the climate has been stable since the dinosaurs isn't supported by the evidence.
I mean have you looked at the charts showing the little ice age and the warm medieval period? The variation of temperature is orders of magnitude different to what we are experiencing now - I don't think that it's very relevant, is it? While climate hasn't been "stable" as in "hasn't changed", it has remained in a very narrow band of t°, of which we are slipping out of it at a much faster rate than all your examples.…
Re: Methane may not warm the Earth quite as much as previously thought
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you bother changing the graph to show world population instead of just looking at the default selection? Here is the link to assist you in this: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/population-and-demograp... It is a straight upwards line. But as I said, they don't care about population, only CO2 levels, which also go up in a straight line. It would indeed be a waste of time for you to argue further, because you…
(not a climate scientist) Also, for the graph showing "peaks" - it seems to me that the "pattern of peaks" is constant through your graph, but the average temperature rises continually through the peaks. If I were to guess, the peaks are things like volcanoes, currents and such, which are "constant" through time. The rise in CO2 is shown in the graph by the median not being a flat line.
Re: Methane may not warm the Earth quite as much as previously thought
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
You make a good point about animal-based carbon emissions being a closed loop, but I don't think your conclusion that this loop doesn't accelerate the greenhouse effect is correct. Methane degrades to C02 in 1-1 proportion. So at any time, if more atmospheric carbon is concentrated as methane than as C02 then the greenhouse effect will be stronger at that time (because methane is a stronger GHG). If agriculture remov…
> I don't think your conclusion that this loop doesn't accelerate the greenhouse effect is correct It's not like mammalian herbivores are a recent invention. If a constant amount of mammalian herbivores in the world would cause a constant acceleration of greenhouse effect then the greenhouse effect would have increased exponentially for millions of years already. That has not been the case. If you increase the number…
And, also, we kinda quadrupled the cheptel size in 50 years ? https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production#global-meat-produ...
(To be fair, I was expecting more, and I was again astonished by the relative numbers of cattle vs poultry)
Re: Methane may not warm the Earth quite as much as previously thought
#260We just had a conversation the other day about climate change and methane, and some people were saying 20x as strong as CO2, and others were saying and sometimes correcting them to 28. According to this article the correct answer is 20. That’s still over an order of magnitude difference. It still doesn’t change the priorities much, it means you can leak 40% more methane from a system before it’s worse that coal, but…