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

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

#91

Post by WastingMyTime89 »

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 deniers are mostly denying that the impact of human activities on climate is real. They are just attacking the models as a convenient scapegoat which is weird because everyone know the models can be criticised but there is undeniable evidence for human emitted CO2 having an impact so it’s mostly a waste of time.

If you really want to criticise the models, demographic hypotheses are far more questionable than anything having to do with methane by the way. Population growth was widely overestimated in the 90s for example and might still be. Plus the impact of an aging population and immigration becoming the main factor of population growth in the USA, Europe and China isn’t really well studied. This is partially voluntary by the way as it quickly leads to unsavoury questions.

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

#92

Post by csours »

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…

There's not one monolithic group of "deniers".

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

#93

Post by sbaiddn »

myshpa wrote: post #86
xyzzyz wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Methane in atmosphere today is at 2 ppm, carbon dioxide is at 420 ppm. If methane is 20 times more potent, this implies that atmospheric methane is equivalent to 40 extra ppm of carbon dioxide. If we removed literally all methane from the atmosphere, this would be equivalent to reducing carbon dioxide concentration to 380 ppm. This would bring us back to climate of 2005. By any reasonable measure, climate in 2023 is…

> 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 optimization focusing our energy on issues that are an order of magnitude away from the main process.

If this were a conversation about a C loop, we wouldn't be emotional about it and we'd could argue better (for example, methane production also releases green house gases)

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

#94

Post by orwin »

it_citizen wrote: post #44
hinkley wrote: 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…

The other big difference is that methane stays only around 12 years in the atmosphere compared to centuries for CO2.

Half life is 12 year. It also rise rapidly in the high troposphere (where the magic happen), so the methane we emit today will have an effect in 2-3 year, whereas the carbon we emit today will have an effect in roughly 20 year. Today's climate is caused by 2003 emissions.

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

#95

Post by notahacker »

shrubble wrote: post #78
Loquebantur wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason your comment is bad isn't you pointing out some "truth". The reason is your comment being misleading. You pretend, the accuracy of climate models was insufficient for any relevant conclusions to be made. That is just nonsense. The interesting part is people clinging onto anything calling that impending climate catastrophe (or its human cause) into question. Individual subjective short-term benefits outweig…

You're talking about changing literally trillions of dollars worth of economic activity, per year, now and supposedly for the next 50 or 100 years, across the whole of Western civilization. The requirement for the math being absolutely "spot-on" in this case is extremely high. Is it?

No, the model doesn't need to be "absolutely spot on" for it to be correct about the correlation between industrial activity and sustained global temperature rises.

And that argument works better in reverse anyway: we're talking about a trend implying large parts of the planet becoming uninhabitable for present levels of human population within a relatively short time frame (which will also have an effect on economic activity!). If contrarians really have a good faith belief that this trend is caused by some other factor and will be self correcting, perhaps they could deign to specify their own testable assumptions and make their own model...

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

#96

Post by ulrashida »

hinkley wrote: 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.

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

#97

Post by throwaway09223 »

kvgr wrote: post #66
orev wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

All plants we eat are fertilized. We can stop fertilizing and all die.

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.

The methane production issue is in addition to the plant/meat production inefficiencies.

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

#98

Post by freedomben »

henearkr wrote: post #30

To be honest, it would be awesome if the title could be change from "Methane may not warm the Earth quite as much as previously thought" to "Methane is 20x worse than CO2 instead of 28x worse".

I agree with you that would be a better title, for a number of reasons. However I would advocate against changing it.

The title here on HN is the same as the title in the original/linked article. Something I personally live about HN is we don't editorialize by rewriting headlines to reframe things to fit our preferred perception (even when we really believe that perception is correct). This is important for cognitive diversity.

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

#99

Post by dmbche »

shrubble wrote: post #81
kennywinker wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except climate change is happening, and there's no doubt about that because knowing it's happening isn't relying on models, it's relying on thermometers (and to a lesser extent ice cores to confirm that it's human-driven rather than a natural change). How bad climate change will be, yeah I suppose there is a little fuzzyness there. But given how bad it COULD be (think: complete extinction of humanity, or an end of ci…

The temperature has changed repeatedly without any evidence of human involvement over those longer time periods we can observe. And the levels of CO2 etc. have changed as well, during time periods when it could not possibly have been blamed on humans. I grew up in Canada, in an area with lots of farms... and I remember the high school trips to different geographical features such as moraines which are the residue of…

I don't think you understand what you are arguing.

Yes, the average temperature of earth has chaged vastly over its history, giving different levels of habitability.

At this time, we're in a really good spot for habitability, and we are seeing that we are slipping out of it.

There is evidence that some of the temperature change could very well be human made, and thus easy to stop (compared to, say, the emissions of volcanoes).

For some reason you argue that nothing should be done, because nothing was done in past massive climate changes, which resolved in mass extinctions.

Is anything I'm saying wrong?

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

#100

Post by throwawaymaths »

ulrashida wrote: post #96
hinkley wrote: 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.

I think they mean 20 is only an ~ 1order of magnitude more than 1
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