Live data from Hacker News

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

sciencenews.org

341–350 of 450 posts

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

#341
post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, you're spewing nonsense. For anyone having read this far: - "the mann lawsuit" is climategate, where some people found a single sentence out of context that sounded off out of years of emails. Mann sued the people that accused him of skewing the facts, and won a defamation suit. - while you write about things around the hockey stick graph, you dance around describing what they show. You can't "manufacture"…

That's backwards! Michael Mann filed a defamation lawsuit against a skeptic and then lost it nine years later. The court awarded the defendant full costs: https://climatechangedispatch.com/tim-ball-defeats-michael-m... Not only did the B.C. Supreme Court grant Ball’s application for dismissal of the nine-year, multi-million dollar lawsuit, it also took the additional step of awarding full legal costs to Ball. The cas…

Mann v competitive enterprise institute recognizes that a jury would find their comments as deragatory, false and damaging, and the suit was dropped because Mann delayed the proceedings as he was "busy with other things".

No where was his data found fraudulent - the court recognized that Mr.Ball's statements are derogatory. The delay is a technicality that has nothing to do with science.

The article you linked is very inflamatory and makes this seem much more of a big deal than it is - nowhere do they discuss the court decision itseld, but they bring up more than 3 scientists from the 90's shitting on climate change.

I'd be weary of this news outlet.

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

#342
post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How large were they? With a source please, you say a lot of garbage that I'd like not to have to sift through. Every source I see shows clearly that both your events were much less than 1°. Bison fossils? What about ree rings and ice core samples? How are bones a possible indiction of anything? Climate gate had a single sentence that seemed off to someone who has never done statistical analysis, if taken out of conte…

ClimateGate had numerous emails that in context showed serious malfeasance. They were literally saying they were going to exclude any scientific work that disagreed with them "even if they had to redefine the peer reviewed literature to do so". It certainly wasn't a single sentence. Try reading them yourself and see! Re: fossils. Example: http://www.museumgolling.at/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/9_Sch... But there are o…

I will now stop answering and direct anyone reading to read the papers themselves

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

#343
post #330
post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a detail missing in your Calculation. Global Warming Potential of Methane over a 20 year Time period is a bit more than 80 times that of CO2. https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/understanding-global-warmin... So, redrawing your path by your method, if we remove ALL of the Atmospheric Methane today, we would be reducing GHG concentrations by about 160ppm CO2 equivalent, which takes the overall CO2 concentrations…

> Global Warming Potential of Methane over a 20 year Time period is a bit more than 80 times that of CO2. Where in the linked document it says that? Because I do not think it’s true.

2nd para beneath the side heading: "Are there alternatives to the 100-year GWP for comparing GHGs?"

GWP calculations has been an active area of research for a long time.

For instance, if you look up the table beneath the VALUES side-heading in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_potential, you would notice that from 1995IPCC to the recent one, Scientists are getting more and more closer to ~80 GWP.

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

#344
post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's backwards! Michael Mann filed a defamation lawsuit against a skeptic and then lost it nine years later. The court awarded the defendant full costs: https://climatechangedispatch.com/tim-ball-defeats-michael-m... Not only did the B.C. Supreme Court grant Ball’s application for dismissal of the nine-year, multi-million dollar lawsuit, it also took the additional step of awarding full legal costs to Ball. The cas…

Mann v competitive enterprise institute recognizes that a jury would find their comments as deragatory, false and damaging, and the suit was dropped because Mann delayed the proceedings as he was "busy with other things". No where was his data found fraudulent - the court recognized that Mr.Ball's statements are derogatory. The delay is a technicality that has nothing to do with science. The article you linked is ver…

Mann filed a lot of lawsuits over this and has lost all of them:

https://www.steynonline.com/11508/youre-once-twice-three-tim...

He didn't spend 9 years fighting a very expensive lawsuit and then, when he finally had a chance to prove that his work wasn't fraudulent in front of a judge, decide he was busy with other things lol! He refused to present the relevant evidence because his goal from the start was an ideologically motivated litigation war, in his own words:

thanks Phil. there is a possibility that I can ruin National Review over this. Going to talk w/ some big time libel lawyers to see if there is the potential for a major lawsuit here that will bring this filthy organization down for good.

But then National Review was removed from the case and so there was no chance for him to achieve his goal via abusive litigation anymore.

Mann is unquestionably a fraud even in the eyes of his colleagues. He deliberately deleted data that disproved his reconstruction because he knew that if he was honest "skeptics would have a field day":

As lead author, Mann decided to omit the Briffa data without the input of his other lead authors.. . . Mann’s own collaborators cautioned him against the deletion. IPCC TAR Coordinating Lead Author Chris Folland wrote to Mann that Briffa’s data “contradicts the multiproxy curve and dilutes the message rather significantly.”. . . Briffa himself urged Mann not to succumb to “pressure to present a nice tidy story” by “ignor[ing]” his post-1960 results. . . . Mann agreed with them on the merits but bemoaned the data’s political impact: “[I]f we show Keith’s series . . . skeptics [will] have a field day.”

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

#345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a step function and draw a trend line through it, the trend line will go up, but that doesn't imply a continuous process. CO2 forcing is (asserted to be) a continuous process. More co2 = higher temperature. The attempts to explain why that's observably not the case have become particularly wild in recent years, yet we are constantly told the science is settled and other untrue things.

Co2 is far from the only thing affecting temperature. The graph you're posting is clearly not a step function either. More like some kind of oscillation with an additional linear trend. Maybe the oscillation is el nino, it seems to be roughly periodic to 7 years or so, I don't know. Edit: the bigger peaks are bang on el nino years, especially the '98 peak

Yep the step function is El Nino. There is also La Nina which can cool things, the AMO and other natural inputs that affect temperature. So it turns into a debate about how much each factors matters, which is the big set of unknowns that have no clear answer. Hence why the science isn't settled.

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

#346
post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mann v competitive enterprise institute recognizes that a jury would find their comments as deragatory, false and damaging, and the suit was dropped because Mann delayed the proceedings as he was "busy with other things". No where was his data found fraudulent - the court recognized that Mr.Ball's statements are derogatory. The delay is a technicality that has nothing to do with science. The article you linked is ver…

Mann filed a lot of lawsuits over this and has lost all of them: https://www.steynonline.com/11508/youre-once-twice-three-tim... He didn't spend 9 years fighting a very expensive lawsuit and then, when he finally had a chance to prove that his work wasn't fraudulent in front of a judge, decide he was busy with other things lol! He refused to present the relevant evidence because his goal from the start was an ideolog…

All dimissed on technicalities, go read the judgments

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

#347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is also the fact that both wetlands and melting permafrost emit methane, and both sources seem to be increasing their emissions as the world warms. This is a scary feedback loop, and that’s before we get to things like undersea clathrates.

Such dangerous feedback loops are conjectured but not actually a threat. It can be proven with historical evidence like this paper, which shows that during the Roman times it must have been much hotter than today, like somewhere between 3-7 degrees hotter, based on the discovery of bison fossils in the Alps. This is well beyond the level climatologists claim would cause runaway feedback driven global warming and mass…

This sounds like a bunch of irrelevant nonsense. Not sure why you would post it.

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

#348
post #136
post #13

We 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…

Per the IPCC’s AR5, the GWP20 (“Global Warming Potential, i.e. relative radiative forcing over 20 years) of methane is about 80X that of CO2, while the GWP100 is 26-32, or about 28X. I have a paper I’m (very slowly) working that argues that these figures may be too low. Our current model of CH4 emissions and natural destruction assume a lifetime of 9-10 years in the atmosphere. The problem is if you do some simple st…

The calculus on this is going to be hard because methane can’t absorb photons that have already been absorbed by the atmosphere around it.

It’s a bit like calculating if I’ll die of cancer. If you could protect me from everything you might be able to know that I’d die of colon cancer at 75. But here I am breathing weird dust and walking a route that starts on city streets and driving X miles a year and you just don’t know what’s gonna get me.

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

#349
post #13

We 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…

How is 20 vs. 28 vs. 40 an order of magnitude change? This phrase is usually reserved for changes in base-10 order: e.g. 2 vs 20 vs 200 are order of magnitude changes.

Between methane and carbon dioxide.

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

#350
post #13

We 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…

Methane also has a half-life in the atmosphere of 12 years, rather than centuries for CO2.

CO2 doesn’t have a half-life. It has to be consumed.
Post reply on HN