3 ms·

Ah, apparently it's a much more significant factor in warmer climates: https://www.internationalrivers.org/campaigns/reservoir-emissions https://www.internation

• Retric 9y ago
  That's a kind of an apples to baseball comparison. Methane becomes vastly more important over extremely short time frames but with a 12ish year half-life it's long term contribution is mostly as a carbon source. Further, tiny dams produce very little power. So, if you play with the numbers you can get extremely different results. On the other hand if you look at the annual 13,100 GWh from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._A._C._Bennett_Dam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._A._C._Bennett_Dam times the 49 years it's been in operation that's the equivalent of (1,000,00 kg / GWH from coal) * 13,100 * 49 = 707,573,630 short tons of CO2 which is vasly larger than all the biomass in the lake to start with. Further, you can log the land before you start minimizing the total biomass flooded.