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Methane rises to highest level on record
- perfunctory 6y agoThis is not really a news anymore, is it. Methane levels are setting new records, co2 levels are settings new records, total GHG emissions are rising, temperature is rising, everything is rising, every freaking year. Year after year. This news sounds a little bit like saying "The age of the universe rises to the highest level on record. It got older. Again." The news will be when global GHG levels stop rising and start decreasing.
- kilroy_jones 6y agoMight not be a lot of people around to report the news when that happens.
- wiz21c 6y agonot funny at all :-/
- varbhat 6y agoWhat is the solution though? I believe that the main reason for these problems are population explosion.
- perfunctory 6y agoEverybody knows what the solution is. There is no lack of solutions. There is a lack of courage to implement them. While population may be a concern, it's not the main problem. > The richest 10% of people in the world are responsible for around 50% of global emissions https://oi-files-d8-prod.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/file_attachments/mb-extreme-carbon-inequality-021215-en.pdf https://oi-files-d8-prod.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/s3fs-pub...
- xiphias2 6y agoWith Tesla being one of the best investments of the last decade (after Bitcoin and NVidia maybe), large investors have to take CO2 emissions seriously. People are already paying extra money for sustainability, and in the future it will be the only rational business decision as well.
- Angostura 6y agoThe problem is that the solutions are mildly inconvenient, and we can't have that, in the face of an existential threat.
- aboringusername 6y agoHow is the population not the "main problem" here? Take a look at the locust, and how in [1], they say: "Cheke’s team is recommending a fungus called Metarhizium anisopliae, which kills a locust by growing inside its body." Typically, when a population becomes unsustainable, as humans are because of their immense requirements over vast decades, we tend to find a way to 'control' that population. Typically, this is by killing them. Yet, because we have the capability to rationalize we understand vast swarms of locusts are terrible yet vast swarms of humans are just something we have to accept. The idea that we need to kill billions of humans would be unfathomable, yet, reducing our numbers will be the only way to make life on earth sustainable - for all living things. This is something Sir David Attenborough also agrees with [2]. This planet is not, was not and will never be capable of sustaining 8 billion healthy, prosperous humans with fair and equal access to food, water and shelter. We need to kill, or in some way reduce the number of humans on this planet. Anything else is a gigantic waste of time and will only serve as a distraction and way to make us feel better that we can somehow overcome this earth threatening disease called "human kind". Because of our constant encroachment into nature, we are pushing animals to their limits, which is how great pandemics are developing and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future (e.g wet markets). Coronavirus is not the worst pandemic we're dealing with right now. Humankind is. And whilst we're constantly taking space away from nature, nature will fight back and take away ourselves. We are the worst problem this planet has. [1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00725-x https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00725-x [2]: https://www.bbc.com/news/av/science-environment-45741482/sir-david-attenborough-population-growth-has-to-come-to-an-end https://www.bbc.com/news/av/science-environment-45741482/sir...
- xwdv 6y agoFrom the article, the solution is obvious, but no one has the courage to implement it. An artificial virus, deadly and highly contagious, with long incubation periods, forcing people to stay home and sending high CO2 emission industries crumbling into bankruptcy. Look what something as weak as COVID has done in a short amount of time. Also make another virus that can spread through high methane emitting livestock and kills them quickly, and anyone who eats an infected animal. At the same time if you create a vaccine against the virus, you can sell it to powerful and wealthy individuals on the black market for vast sums of money. There might be riots, but why contain it? Let it spread through the schools and churches.
- kilroy_jones 6y agoI'm going to agree this a solution, but I think we should probably tick through the first thousand or two more reasonable ones before we get to mass murder.
- xwdv 6y agoThere is no time, a lot of the other solutions require people to willingly change their behaviors en masse. But people don’t change. They have to be forced to changed.
- carapace 6y ago"Release a deadly virus to save the world!" You're talking like a character from a bad sci-fi movie. And I should know. I've been binge-watching MST3K for a week solid.
- hannob 6y agoI recommend reading this if the first thing that comes to mind is something about population: https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/9/26/16356524/the-population-question https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/9/26/1635652... As for what the solutions are: Reduce meat consumption, particularly beef, develop better meat/milk/cheese alternatives, replace fossil fuels, for the time that won't be completely possible fix methane leakage in fossil fuel production.
- Eric_WVGG 6y agoThere is a pretty simple solution to the meat problem. Most of that methane comes from cows, and some seaweed thrown into their diet eliminates their methane emissions. https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/11/23/1826/how-seaweed-could-shrink-livestocks-global-carbon-hoofprint/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/11/23/1826/how-seaweed...
- hannob 6y agoThis seaweed story comes up so often. Every time I looked it up it seems this is based on some very small studies. As far as I know noone has ever implemented this at scale (if you know otherwise - please provide links) and is selling meat produced that way. Look, I'm not against researching such stuff. But calling that "a pretty simple solution" before this has ever been tried out for real doesn't seem valid.
- Eric_WVGG 6y agoSimpler than convincing the globe to change their eating habits, certainly. I don’t have any better idea than you how the science works out, and the supply chain thing sounds nontrivial, but that’s nothing compared to getting masses of people to change their habits. We can’t talk red staters into take wearing masks for a few months, and next we are going to make them give up bbq?
- germinalphrase 6y agoOr allow prices to rise and people will choose to eat less meat on their own.
- carapace 6y agoOne major part of the solution is applied ecology, such as Permaculture or Syntropic agriculture. We can grow all our own food (and even carbon-neutral alcohol fuel) in gardens in ecologically harmonious ways. (The historical rule is: If your civilization destroys soil it fails.) The population is leveling off and is projected to stabilize by 2100.
- gridlockd 6y ago> We can grow all our own food (and even carbon-neutral alcohol fuel) in gardens in ecologically harmonious ways. [citation needed] Not sure what kind of garden you are talking about, I like gardens to plant vegetables and such, but their caloric output is very low.
- carapace 6y agoLook up "Permaculture" or "Syntropic agriculture". Basically you mimic Nature and intensify it.
- gridlockd 6y agoI'm broadly aware that this stuff exists, but where does it say that this can produce enough output to rival current methods?
- carapace 6y agoI don't have a link handy, I'll try to find it again and post it, but there's an article or video about Ernst Gotsch, the founder of what he calls "Syntropic" farming, where it talks about how his farm produces the best cocoa in the world at 3x the crop of conventional farms of the same quality with no inputs. It's important to remember that the modern mega-farms are only cost-effective due to massive subsidies. A typical modern farm loses something like a dollar an acre per year and would fail immediately without subsidies. They're not profitable. While they are certainly highly efficient for a narrow range of species, they are physically incapable of producing the vast majority of food species at all. Comparing an acre of modern farmland growing modern corn in the modern way with modern subsidies to an acre of a Permaculture or Syntropic food forest: The modern farm will produce far more of that corn than the eco-farm. But it will require inputs: fertilizer, irrigation, and everything concerned with the farm machinery, etc., and only produce that corn. Everything else: water, land, machinery, people, gets used up or polluted by the process. In contrast the acre of food forest might not produce any corn at all, or it may contain four or five or more species of it, as well as fruit and nut trees, bananas and plantain plants, climbing fruiting vines, berry bushes, root crops, flowers, cucurbits, bamboo, etc. resulting in dozens of different yields. It requires no inputs. It's more labor intensive and cannot (yet) be automated. But it's fun, easy, profitable, and it produces the material needed to make more of itself, so it's scalable.
- doitLP 6y agoTop climate solutions ranked by amount of greenhouse gas they remove: https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/table-of-solutions https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/table-of-solutions #1 is reduced food waste
- cedex12 6y agoHow trustworthy is this table?
- daneel_w 6y agoOverheard banter on this topic at work a few weeks ago: "yeah 'coz everyone's sitting at home farting in the sofa every evening since the f*ing corona happened instead of going about their spare time as usual".
- selimthegrim 6y agoMaybe after dinner smoking will make a comeback.
- spodek 6y agoWe are not powerless against this. We eat more meat than ever. We subsidize meat production at every level so that all taxpayers pay for cheap meat, even vegetarians and vegans. We can reduce subsidies, or even reverse them to accurately account for the externalities of pollution and global heating. While population growth rate is lowering, humans are still increasing in population. We can make contraception and education more available globally. The United States' science education has declined for generations so people don't understand nature and how we affect it. We can improve science education.
- 6d6b73 6y agoMeat is not the problem. Long before people there was more animals alive on this planet and they pooped, farted and ate each other at a scale that we can't imagine. Just think about the bison, or passenger pigeons.
- lumberingjack 6y agoAbsolutely this as a native American one of my biggest dreams is to view America before all of the forest was completely removed from the entire country and to see all of mega herds of whitetail deer and bison roam free. Carrier pigeon phlox so large they block out the sky for half a day
- gbrown 6y agoInterestingly, much of the current young woodland would have been gone, replaced by prairie and oak savanna.
- gbrown 6y agoCitation needed? They ate grass instead of corn, and spread their waste over vast areas of wilderness, ready to be incorporated back into the plantlife. Also, a quick Google search says there were 30-60 million bison roaming the plains. Today, there are 95 million cows, and another 70 some million pigs.
- blackomen6 6y agoInterestingly, Burger King just announced that they're changing the diet of their cattle to reduce emissions by 33% (of their cattle, not worldwide). Apparently lemongrass leaves will accomplish this. https://www.smartenergydecisions.com/blog/2020/07/15/burger-king-to-limit-cattle-methane-emissions-with-new-diet?contact_id=158571&inf_contact_key=4fd3f3c05a4f6e3e154ff8def1c8149f842e902fbefb79ab9abae13bfcb46658 https://www.smartenergydecisions.com/blog/2020/07/15/burger-...
- totetsu 6y agobacteria in the wet rice farming system is also a big source of methane, with a positive feedback loop for rising temperature.
- christiansakai 6y agoI'd expect that this pandemic actually put a brake in emission acceleration. What happened?
- lambertsimnel 6y agoFjolsvith suggests a possible answer in another thread: > With the meat packaging plant closures and the "shortage" of beef, the cattle herds are probably growing in numbers, which could cause the spike of methane. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23858601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23858601