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> Methane emissions have a much shorter residency time in the atmosphere than carbon. It's literally an order of magnitude difference: methane is significantly

> 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.

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.