Live data from Hacker News

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

sciencenews.org

421–430 of 450 posts

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

#421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're still left trying to explain the gradual linear increase over time. Modelling strongly suggests that this is due to increased carbon.

Modelling assumes it's carbon, that's taken as a premise. The models are built to calculate that the climate is stable if not for industrial activity. If the climate is simulated as non-stable even in pre-industrial times, that's assumed to represent a bug in the model.

Technically speaking, gradual increases and decreases over time don't have to be explained for CO2-doom to be wrong. Invalidating a theory doesn't require replacing it with a different one. But it could be AMO or sunspot activity or many other things that were once considered uncontroversially to have a big impact on the climate.

National Geographic, 1967:

Dr. Hurd C. Willett, Professor of Meteorology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, suggests the answer. Dr. Willett, one of our staff affiliates this year, has shown us how cyclic changes in the climate closely parallel the cyclic changes in sunspot activity—the manifestations of powerful electrical energy discharges from the sun. We now feel confident that our investigations here back up the solar-climate theory of weather cycles.

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

#422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Secondly, think about this thought experiment: a layer of pure CO2 gas covers the lowest layer of air near the surface. By how much would that get warmer compared to air? The answer is there won't be any difference. That's because the surface and the air near it are at the same temperature, so they emit exactly the same amount of energy. You've added an assumption in your question that the entire atmosphere is at t…

You skipped the part where I explicitly concluded that the effect comes from the difference in temperatures. I don't ignore it, I first understand the zero order - at uniform temperatures, there is no effect of CO2. Which leads to an understanding that if CO2 does indeed make a difference, it is the result of the temperature differences. Then the part where I'm not at all certain about which direction the effect shou…

Have you considered that the Dunning–Kruger effect might be in play here? You're making lots of big claims and insisting everyone who disagrees with you doesn't understand physics. I have a degree in astrophysics and I've worked quite hard to get through thermodynamics courses. I'm quite confident that I do understand the thermodynamics involved here. Your argument seems to boil down to:

- The fact that you don't understand the mechanism through which CO2 would heat the atmosphere, and therefore you think it isn't happening. - You reject every single climate model because of the simplifying assumptions and "bad code". Given that simplifying assumptions are necessary to do modeling and the amount of conspiratorial thinking in your other comments, I suspect that there aren't any assumptions you would agree with. - You admit that warming is happening, but don't consider that to be evidence in favour of the models (even though they fit the data quite well). You claim they fit it poorly, well, let's see that study then!

> You skipped the part where I explicitly concluded that the effect comes from the difference in temperatures. I don't ignore it, I first understand the zero order - at uniform temperatures, there is no effect of CO2. Which leads to an understanding that if CO2 does indeed make a difference, it is the result of the temperature differences.

This is a vacuous statement.

> Then the part where I'm not at all certain about which direction the effect should be, is because while CO2 decreases thermal conductivity by radiation, it increases thermal conductivity by convection because the heat capacity is higher for CO2. Which is actually a much better intuition if you want to understand how does water vapor seems to have such negligible effect despite the fact it is a "greenhouse gas" and "absorbs much more heat".

Your lack of understanding is not a flaw in climate science.

> You want me to point out bugs? There are like 20 different climate models. I've seen heat capacity being constant independent of pressure, temperature, CO2, density, etc. Not just heat capacity, but also other "constants". Not in a single place because the code is a mess, they actually have several different modules with different constants, so say the radiation simulation is extremely detailed mess that's completely unreadable, and the cloud simulation just starts all over with their own different constants.

This is just you repeating what you said before. The code quality is not relevant unless you point out a bug.

> I'm sorry, but it is your thermodynamic intuition that's completely wrong. Equilibrium to you means "things stop moving". That... not how thermodynamics works at all. The reason that ordinary things look like they are "not moving" in equilibrium in your everyday life is because they do move, but at scales much smaller than you. Do the Brownian motion experiment.

I never made any such claim, nor did I imply that. Strawman argument.

> The models don't have any significance beyond this bit or maybe two bits if you try to be generous about their abysmal performance regarding temperatures.

What do you mean by this? Many of the models fit the warming in the recent past quite well. This process is called hindcasting.

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

#423
post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're wildly overestimating the amount of calories consumed by "fat people" if you think it's more impactful than the 20x factor you mentioned for meats vs plants.

Presumably most obese people also eat meat though, and in higher quantities.

Not that much more. A fit person who exercises regularly will probably consume more calories than an overweight person who is mostly sedentary.

Both age and gender are better predictors of caloric consumption than BMI.

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

#424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_by_country shows that 19% of Asians are vegetarian, meaning hundreds of millions. Multiple studies show vegetarians live longer, but they are correlational.

Right. I'm not asking about studies about people that may or may not have chose veganism/vegetarianism at a certain point, but about large groups that exist that way for significant periods of time. People that seek out a certain diet are going to show better quality of life than people that don't, regardless if it's veganism or not.

Approximately 40% of India is vegetarian for religious reasons and have been for an extremely long time - several thousand years.

I noticed that while everyone here is discussing vegetarianism, you are discussing veganism -- which is different.

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

#425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You skipped the part where I explicitly concluded that the effect comes from the difference in temperatures. I don't ignore it, I first understand the zero order - at uniform temperatures, there is no effect of CO2. Which leads to an understanding that if CO2 does indeed make a difference, it is the result of the temperature differences. Then the part where I'm not at all certain about which direction the effect shou…

Have you considered that the Dunning–Kruger effect might be in play here? You're making lots of big claims and insisting everyone who disagrees with you doesn't understand physics. I have a degree in astrophysics and I've worked quite hard to get through thermodynamics courses. I'm quite confident that I do understand the thermodynamics involved here. Your argument seems to boil down to: - The fact that you don't und…

Again I understand the mechanism, but I still claim it's not enough to wave your hands and tell the story, calculations matter, and in this case, the quality of calculations is extremely important. You are used to astrophysics where the standard is simply much higher, and you project that onto climate science.

There are no error boundaries or even attempt at giving meaningful estimation of the error in these calculations, in fact, the various models disagree quite wildly in the sense that after accounting for variation between models, you're left with barely a weak directional claim.

There's also a significance difference between predicting global climate, and estimating with accuracy the CO2 forcing. While the global temperature is at least measurable, nobody has any way to test CO2 forcing meaningfully. Which is the entire claim.

The reason for the decision to move trillions of dollars is the prediction about CO2 forcing, but if it is wrong and we're going to rely on "renewable energy" a.k.a. wind and sun when we are currently forecasting they are going to be unreliable, that's suicide. You can even worry about whether it is the correct decision even if the entire uncertainty was geopolitics by the way. In fact, just the unpredictability of China alone is enough to put the entire policy of the west in huge doubt, but that's something else.

> This is just you repeating what you said before. The code quality is not relevant unless you point out a bug.

I literally just pointed out several bugs. These things are not constant, they depend on these parameters, you're going to accumulate huge errors if you don't take them into account, and even worse, you're going to completely miscalculate CO2 forcing if you have entire sections of your code which ignore CO2 forcing (by having "constants" that aren't constants at all but depend on CO2).

And again, you're projecting from a real science (astrophysics) where you can point your telescope anywhere you wish and collect data, which is worth millions of bits, to climate science where the only "data" is very few temperature measurements which need to be averaged to retain a very weak signal. But on the other hand, nobody dies because they got astrophysics wrong (except in "Don't look up" movie)

It's not science. They hardly have any data points fitting their models compared to the size of these models and the variation in their results, and most importantly, they don't have any data on the central claim (CO2 forcing) at all. My argument is basically, nobody can trust the story because stories are misleading, you need a detailed calculation. Not misleading in a conspiratorial way, misleading in that this is numerical question which we humans suck at estimating narratively.

And again, those calculations could and should be much less of a dumpster fire if we're going to trust the future of humanity with them. Another example of "simplifying assumptions" blowing up in the face of the economy was 1987 stock crash where "simplifying assumptions" in modelling option prices blew up in everyone's faces and led to multi year recession. And another "simplifying assumption" in the coronavirus response led by misleading infection models and proceeding ahead out of pure cognitive dissonance. I'm sure the climate modelers are doing the best they can, but the best they can is not enough.

This dishonesty about the certainty of models, which usually results from a broken telephone where the honestly and articulated science claims are transformed into propaganda that misleads even the leaders is a bigger problem than what these models claim to solve.

If this blows in everyone's faces and "moving to renewables" turns out to be a complete disaster, they will be hanging scientists in the streets and I won't blame them. Everyone's maximizing for the "scientists were extremely accurate in their predictions and we listened to them and got it right" scenario and it's because in everyone's mind the probability the scientists are right is like 90% when in reality it's more likely 10%.

I don't want to convince you it's wrong. I want to convince you it's very non-trivial calculation to understand whether the problem is CO2, that framing it as "scientists always knew that and it's basic physics" is extremely misleading about the certainty, and that the narrativistic mindset is extremely dangerous.

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

#426

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…

> Methane naturally turns into CO2 in the atmosphere After how long? A half-life of a decade , as I understand it? Not exactly the order of magnitude of luxury time we have to spare. > Even if it did increase warming more than CO2 "Even if it did" is strange wording for an established fact. Do you write "even if the sky was blue"? > once methane emissions reach a steady level, reducing methane emissions won't change…

Half life of anything is fine. The problem with emissions is their cumulative effect, something like methane sourced from plants isn't a problem.

Methane from fossil fuels is a problem, however.

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

#427
post #190
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> nutrients [...] only found in meat Nutritional yeast is tasty and naturally has b12, and most cereals/grains are fortified with it. > amino acids [...] only found in meat This just isn't true, you can get all amino acids from plant-based sources like soybeans, lentils, and peanuts. Source: I have been vegan for 5 years and I still have a healthy 6 minute mile, 25 consecutive pullups, V5-V7 range boulder problem cli…

> Nutritional yeast is tasty and naturally has b12, and most cereals/grains are fortified with it. Taurine, Carnosine, Creatine, and B12 don't exist in significant quantities outside of meat. Nutritional yeast is often supplemented with B12 but the bioavailability of it compared to animal protein is low. You will need to take an actual supplement to get the right amount of B12 your body needs to function optimally. Y…

One cup of milk supplies 46% of US RDA of B12.

Taurine is found in eggs.

Neither are meat.

Creatine and carnosine are produced by the body from amino acids.

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

#428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there doesn't have to be a difference in radiation energy for the second body to shift the equilibrium temperature

This is physics misunderstanding. There's no such thing as "equilibrium temperature" between two systems. The zeroth law of thermodynamics is that all you need to know in order to tell whether two systems are at thermodynamic equilibrium with each other is the temperature. If they have the same temperature, they are at equilibrium, period. You don't need to know anything else. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeroth_law…

> EDIT: to also correct a little simplification, you can prevent heat loss to radiation by reflectivity. But that's not the case with CO2 in the atmosphere

CO2 absorbing some infrared light and transmitting it back to the earth is a form of reflection.

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

#429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. I'm not asking about studies about people that may or may not have chose veganism/vegetarianism at a certain point, but about large groups that exist that way for significant periods of time. People that seek out a certain diet are going to show better quality of life than people that don't, regardless if it's veganism or not.

Approximately 40% of India is vegetarian for religious reasons and have been for an extremely long time - several thousand years. I noticed that while everyone here is discussing vegetarianism, you are discussing veganism -- which is different.

Yep, I've been intentional in including veganism, and I've noticed others are bringing up vegetarianism.

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

#430
post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fact of the matter is most vegans do not have a B12 deficiency I didn't say they did. I did say they in all likelihood need to supplement their B12. This is well supported by vegans and nutritionists. > nor any of the other unsupported criticisms you've made. I have supported my claims, actually. The fact that you disagree with the science is your problem, not mine. > The evidence is available on the web if you…

> No, I'm making a case for meat Well, that's not really possible. Meat is bad coming and going, objectively speaking. The only thing meat does have going for it is the energy provides, but at the cost of poor health and hurting literarily everyone. If meat producers weren't so greedy, and produced less, a lot less, only what was necessary, a lot of the harm that comes with meat could be mitigated, not the health ris…

You are not persuasive by showing your argument is based on your hate for something
Post reply on HN