8 ms·

> This is simply false. Given methane emissions, we don't actually know that it's better at all, let alone half as bad. Methane emissions have a much shorter r

> This is simply false. Given methane emissions, we don't actually know that it's better at all, let alone half as bad. Methane emissions have a much shorter residency time in the atmosphere than carbon. It's literally an order of magnitude difference: methane is significantly worse for a short period, but over the course of a century carbon dioxide is far worse. That lopsidedness gets even worse when you go out to a millenium. Thinking out to a century from now, it's appropriate to more or less ignore methane and focus on carbon dioxide. > Actually, we're pretty much screwed no matter what we do, which is why the marginal improvement you're trying to say is acceptable, isn't acceptable. "It's unacceptable for ten million people to die, so we shouldn't have a preference between ten and twenty million people dying!" > Is "fighting for even better solutions" what you think you're doing here? As someone who has actually worked full-time on climate solutions and whose carbon emissions are in the bottom 1% of Americans, it's presumptuous of you to assume that you're doing more for the climate because you're regurgitating an article you saw on the Facebook newsfeed.

gxon 7y ago
I really respect anyone who's chosen to willingly sacrifice their lifestyle to reduce their carbon emissions. Very few people are actually willing to do that. So I'm curious about your opinion. Do you think that promoting hope that what we're doing is enough is the right play at this point in time? Decades of warning from the scientific community have yielded effectively 0 progress on halting our exponential march towards ecological collapse. Sure, you can argue for marginal progress here and there. But when the likely end goal remains total collapse of civilization and possible extinction of our species, does it really matter? I know we tend to think of panic and despair as something that prevents us from finding solutions, or even make the problem worse. But maybe pretending that we're going to mostly be OK and figure out climate change is just causing us to be complacent and procrastinate on the problem until it's too late. It may already be too late due to tipping points being triggered. Like I said, I'd love to hear your thoughts, but I've increasingly started to believe that panic is an idea worth spreading. It may be the only way we can ever hope to collectively wake up and start making the sacrifices necessary to survive this extinction event.
- incangold 7y ago
  Same. Not sure why you're getting downvoted. People have been saying we need to avoid scaring people for decades, and look where we are. Panic now, helpfully, to avoid panic later when we are more helpless. I don't know what other options we have for effective systemic change, and would love to hear from anyone who has a better model. Clearly everything we've tried up until now has not worked.
  - scarmig 7y ago
    I'm not sure there's a switch we can flip that turns people from apathetic to supporting a panic-driven set of aggressive and durable legislation to address climate change. The effects of climate change are too long term and stochastic for voters to link policy with their everyday lived experience. Even in Australia at this very moment, only about half of people think Australia should do more about climate change, and it's unclear how many of them would actually prioritize that over other things they value.
    - MiroF 7y ago
      Realistically, the solution has to be to lie and link every natural disaster that could plausibly be related to the climate to the climate. I hate to say that, but thats what needs to be done if we want to compel action.
    - gxon 7y ago
      I personally believe that a key switch we can try flipping is universal basic income. The reasoning is not obvious. Basically, I think we live in a world now where almost everyone is stuck in tunnel vision for surviving today. For example, we have studies now that show significant drops in IQ when people are stressed about how they're going to be paying bills. If the vast majority is struggling financially, they literally might be made dumber and less able to think about complex problems. If we change the rules in a way that effectively says, nobody is getting left behind and nobody is dying of poverty, then maybe, that will be enough to give the masses the breathing room to look up and see long term risks bearing down upon us. Maybe not, but I think it's worth a shot. That's why I'm all in on Andrew Yang. He's the only candidate who gives me a semblance of hope for waking everyone up so that we can try to solve these problems.
lkbm 7y ago
> Methane emissions have a much shorter residency time in the atmosphere than carbon. I Except...methane has a shorter residency time is due to it turning into CO2 at a 7 year half-life, right? I keep hearing this from people who seemingly know a lot more than me about this stuff, and yet prima facie, it seems entirely wrong. It sounds equivalent to "we cause 7X the amount of short-term greenhouse effect, but eventually it drops down to 1X, and that's better than 1X from the get-go". Does it turn into significantly less amount of CO2? How much less? If you can clear it up for me, I'd honestly really appreciate it.
- scarmig 7y ago
  Methane concentration: 2_000 ppb CO2 concentration: 400_000 ppb To elaborate a bit, an atom of carbon in CH4 is around 100x as bad as an atom of carbon in CO2; CH4 is primarily and quickly removed by breaking down into CO2. But the number of carbon atoms we release into the atmosphere as CH4 is much, much less than the number of carbon atoms we release into the atmosphere of CO2. We only care about CH4 because it's 100x as powerful a greenhouse gas as CO2. If we released the methane carbon directly as CO2 carbon, it'd be a measurable amount but dwarfed by other sources.
  - excursionist 7y ago
    > But the number of carbon atoms we release into the atmosphere as CH4 is much, much less than the number of carbon atoms we release into the atmosphere of CO2 Parent's point is that we don't actually know how much methane is released into the atmosphere due to natural gas fracking.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
dr_orpheus 7y ago
> Methane emissions have a much shorter residency time in the atmosphere than carbon. But even with a shorter residency time (I believe it is on the order of 5-7 years) the data that we have shows that methane concentration in the atmosphere [1] is still increasing at a similar rate as that of C02 [2]. Based on this it doesn't seem appropriate to ignore methane. Without better measures to track and prevent methane escaping in to the atmosphere we might not see that trend level off or start to decrease for a significant period of time. [1] https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends_ch4/ https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends_ch4/ [2] https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/ https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/
Neeek 7y ago
While it's true that methane only lasts for a decade in the atmosphere, it decays in to co2 and water vapor so it's not as though it is better in the long run. It's very bad short term and as bad long term.
xxgreg 7y ago
> over the course of a century carbon dioxide is far worse. Note that the methane molecule isn't removed from the atmosphere after it's "residency time", it oxidises into CO2 and water vapour. i.e. a Methane molecule causes much more warming over a short timescale, but measured over millenia it's about the same as CO2. Also - over 100 years the global warming potential (GWP) of methane is 28-36x that of CO2. https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/understanding-global-warming-potentials https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/understanding-global-warmin...
kerkeslager 7y ago
> Methane emissions have a much shorter residency time in the atmosphere than carbon. It's literally an order of magnitude difference: methane is significantly worse for a short period, but over the course of a century carbon dioxide is far worse. That lopsidedness gets even worse when you go out to a millenium. Thinking out to a century from now, it's appropriate to more or less ignore methane and focus on carbon dioxide. 1. Methane emissions capture heat energy in the atmosphere, and that heat energy doesn't just disappear after the methane is gone. Methane is also a long-term problem. 2. Methane's residency time ends when it decomposes into carbon dioxide. Both of these are sort of irrelevant, because we can calculate the long-term effects of methane and see that it does make a significant difference. > > Actually, we're pretty much screwed no matter what we do, which is why the marginal improvement you're trying to say is acceptable, isn't acceptable. > "It's unacceptable for ten million people to die, so we shouldn't have a preference between ten and twenty million people dying!" That's a straw man argument. If we're parodying each others arguments, how's this for a parody of yours? "It's unacceptable for ten million people to die. Saving ten million people sounds hard though. There's something easy we can do, not sure if it will save any lives, but at least I'm doing something!" > > Is "fighting for even better solutions" what you think you're doing here? > As someone who has actually worked full-time on climate solutions and whose carbon emissions are in the bottom 1% of Americans, it's presumptuous of you to assume that you're doing more for the climate because you're regurgitating an article you saw on the Facebook newsfeed. Good on you for what you're doing on here, but I'm not assuming anything or disagreeing with what you do in your personal life. I'm disagreeing with what you're doing here, on Hacker News, where you're promoting a half-assed non-solution to a catastrophic problem.
- xyzzyz 7y ago
  > 1. Methane emissions capture heat energy in the atmosphere, and that heat energy doesn't just disappear after the methane is gone. No, that's completely wrong. Methane does not "capture" the heat. Earth is constantly radiating energy out to the rest of the universe. What methane, CO2 and other greenhouse gases do is to change the radiation properties of the atmosphere, resulting in reflecting some of the energy back to earth. This energy ultimately gets radiated out, but more greenhouse gases means more time before it does, which, assuming constant external irradiation from sun, results in higher steady state temperature. When the methane is gone, its effect on warming is gone.

gxon 7y ago

I really respect anyone who's chosen to willingly sacrifice their lifestyle to reduce their carbon emissions. Very few people are actually willing to do that. So I'm curious about your opinion. Do you think that promoting hope that what we're doing is enough is the right play at this point in time? Decades of warning from the scientific community have yielded effectively 0 progress on halting our exponential march towards ecological collapse. Sure, you can argue for marginal progress here and there. But when the likely end goal remains total collapse of civilization and possible extinction of our species, does it really matter? I know we tend to think of panic and despair as something that prevents us from finding solutions, or even make the problem worse. But maybe pretending that we're going to mostly be OK and figure out climate change is just causing us to be complacent and procrastinate on the problem until it's too late. It may already be too late due to tipping points being triggered. Like I said, I'd love to hear your thoughts, but I've increasingly started to believe that panic is an idea worth spreading. It may be the only way we can ever hope to collectively wake up and start making the sacrifices necessary to survive this extinction event.

incangold 7y ago
Same. Not sure why you're getting downvoted. People have been saying we need to avoid scaring people for decades, and look where we are. Panic now, helpfully, to avoid panic later when we are more helpless. I don't know what other options we have for effective systemic change, and would love to hear from anyone who has a better model. Clearly everything we've tried up until now has not worked.
- scarmig 7y ago
  I'm not sure there's a switch we can flip that turns people from apathetic to supporting a panic-driven set of aggressive and durable legislation to address climate change. The effects of climate change are too long term and stochastic for voters to link policy with their everyday lived experience. Even in Australia at this very moment, only about half of people think Australia should do more about climate change, and it's unclear how many of them would actually prioritize that over other things they value.
  - MiroF 7y ago
    Realistically, the solution has to be to lie and link every natural disaster that could plausibly be related to the climate to the climate. I hate to say that, but thats what needs to be done if we want to compel action.
  - gxon 7y ago
    I personally believe that a key switch we can try flipping is universal basic income. The reasoning is not obvious. Basically, I think we live in a world now where almost everyone is stuck in tunnel vision for surviving today. For example, we have studies now that show significant drops in IQ when people are stressed about how they're going to be paying bills. If the vast majority is struggling financially, they literally might be made dumber and less able to think about complex problems. If we change the rules in a way that effectively says, nobody is getting left behind and nobody is dying of poverty, then maybe, that will be enough to give the masses the breathing room to look up and see long term risks bearing down upon us. Maybe not, but I think it's worth a shot. That's why I'm all in on Andrew Yang. He's the only candidate who gives me a semblance of hope for waking everyone up so that we can try to solve these problems.

lkbm 7y ago

> Methane emissions have a much shorter residency time in the atmosphere than carbon. I Except...methane has a shorter residency time is due to it turning into CO2 at a 7 year half-life, right? I keep hearing this from people who seemingly know a lot more than me about this stuff, and yet prima facie, it seems entirely wrong. It sounds equivalent to "we cause 7X the amount of short-term greenhouse effect, but eventually it drops down to 1X, and that's better than 1X from the get-go". Does it turn into significantly less amount of CO2? How much less? If you can clear it up for me, I'd honestly really appreciate it.

scarmig 7y ago
Methane concentration: 2_000 ppb CO2 concentration: 400_000 ppb To elaborate a bit, an atom of carbon in CH4 is around 100x as bad as an atom of carbon in CO2; CH4 is primarily and quickly removed by breaking down into CO2. But the number of carbon atoms we release into the atmosphere as CH4 is much, much less than the number of carbon atoms we release into the atmosphere of CO2. We only care about CH4 because it's 100x as powerful a greenhouse gas as CO2. If we released the methane carbon directly as CO2 carbon, it'd be a measurable amount but dwarfed by other sources.
- excursionist 7y ago
  > But the number of carbon atoms we release into the atmosphere as CH4 is much, much less than the number of carbon atoms we release into the atmosphere of CO2 Parent's point is that we don't actually know how much methane is released into the atmosphere due to natural gas fracking.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

dr_orpheus 7y ago

> Methane emissions have a much shorter residency time in the atmosphere than carbon. But even with a shorter residency time (I believe it is on the order of 5-7 years) the data that we have shows that methane concentration in the atmosphere [1] is still increasing at a similar rate as that of C02 [2]. Based on this it doesn't seem appropriate to ignore methane. Without better measures to track and prevent methane escaping in to the atmosphere we might not see that trend level off or start to decrease for a significant period of time. [1] https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends_ch4/ https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends_ch4/ [2] https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/ https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/

Neeek 7y ago

While it's true that methane only lasts for a decade in the atmosphere, it decays in to co2 and water vapor so it's not as though it is better in the long run. It's very bad short term and as bad long term.

xxgreg 7y ago

> over the course of a century carbon dioxide is far worse. Note that the methane molecule isn't removed from the atmosphere after it's "residency time", it oxidises into CO2 and water vapour. i.e. a Methane molecule causes much more warming over a short timescale, but measured over millenia it's about the same as CO2. Also - over 100 years the global warming potential (GWP) of methane is 28-36x that of CO2. https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/understanding-global-warming-potentials https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/understanding-global-warmin...

kerkeslager 7y ago

> Methane emissions have a much shorter residency time in the atmosphere than carbon. It's literally an order of magnitude difference: methane is significantly worse for a short period, but over the course of a century carbon dioxide is far worse. That lopsidedness gets even worse when you go out to a millenium. Thinking out to a century from now, it's appropriate to more or less ignore methane and focus on carbon dioxide. 1. Methane emissions capture heat energy in the atmosphere, and that heat energy doesn't just disappear after the methane is gone. Methane is also a long-term problem. 2. Methane's residency time ends when it decomposes into carbon dioxide. Both of these are sort of irrelevant, because we can calculate the long-term effects of methane and see that it does make a significant difference. > > Actually, we're pretty much screwed no matter what we do, which is why the marginal improvement you're trying to say is acceptable, isn't acceptable. > "It's unacceptable for ten million people to die, so we shouldn't have a preference between ten and twenty million people dying!" That's a straw man argument. If we're parodying each others arguments, how's this for a parody of yours? "It's unacceptable for ten million people to die. Saving ten million people sounds hard though. There's something easy we can do, not sure if it will save any lives, but at least I'm doing something!" > > Is "fighting for even better solutions" what you think you're doing here? > As someone who has actually worked full-time on climate solutions and whose carbon emissions are in the bottom 1% of Americans, it's presumptuous of you to assume that you're doing more for the climate because you're regurgitating an article you saw on the Facebook newsfeed. Good on you for what you're doing on here, but I'm not assuming anything or disagreeing with what you do in your personal life. I'm disagreeing with what you're doing here, on Hacker News, where you're promoting a half-assed non-solution to a catastrophic problem.

xyzzyz 7y ago
> 1. Methane emissions capture heat energy in the atmosphere, and that heat energy doesn't just disappear after the methane is gone. No, that's completely wrong. Methane does not "capture" the heat. Earth is constantly radiating energy out to the rest of the universe. What methane, CO2 and other greenhouse gases do is to change the radiation properties of the atmosphere, resulting in reflecting some of the energy back to earth. This energy ultimately gets radiated out, but more greenhouse gases means more time before it does, which, assuming constant external irradiation from sun, results in higher steady state temperature. When the methane is gone, its effect on warming is gone.