11 ms·

Scientists raise alarm over ‘dangerously fast’ growth in atmospheric methane

241 points by jnord 5y ago

twayt 5y ago
- rjbwork 5y ago
  Pretty much. We're definitely gonna fail to do anything significant about any of this crap until it forcibly ends the way everyone actually lives their lives.
  - twayt 5y ago
    It’s time to mandate a law that requires people in power to take a heroic dose of mushrooms twice a year
    - pengaru 5y ago
      Heroic doses of psychedelics don't seem to prevent Burners from participating in the most absurd gratuitous waste of resources that is every BM event. I'm afraid it's not a panacea.
      - twayt 5y ago
        It’s not for a lack of intention though. Lack of critical thinking and maybe justifying the cost? Yes. But in general it seems to be the fastest route to making people realize that they are not more important than the whole.
    - mistermann 5y ago
      This would make for a good viral meme, how could something like that be pulled off in the real world I wonder?
      - twayt 5y ago
        It has to be done in secret, by purely good intentioned third party that has some sort of leverage over the people in power. This group should have one sole purpose of dosing the people in power and otherwise not be allowed to have any further influence. Until our selection mechanisms choose the purest intentioned people rather than expedient and selfish profiteers, the people in power will be driven to optimize objective functions that aren’t conducive for humanity. In the short term, the best way to fix this would be to reveal what is truly happening around them and force them to confront the consequences of their actions and lack thereof. This is very different from the game they have become so familiar with and content with playing.
        mistermann 5y ago
        That would be preferable yes, but think about if even the meme gained widespread popularity, especially among the young. If some people could start to wake up and realize how absurd, how fake our so called democracy is, and start to outright mock it and the normies who continue to blindly worship it as our most sacred institution, perhaps we could squeeze a 5% or so improvement in behavior out of them, for a few years anyways until another patch is realized to wipe that belief from people's minds.
- 0x4d464d48 5y ago
  I support the jobs the methane will provide
- it_does_follow 5y ago
  That should be the new HN tagline, I'm honestly a bit surprised to see this article still on the front page. Usually concerning facts get flagged pretty quickly.
  - kecupochren 5y ago
    It now can not be found on the first 4 pages..
gpt5 5y ago
Genuinely curious - while Methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas, isn’t its half life in the atmosphere only 9 years? Wouldn’t this make it far less concerning than CO2 with its half life of 120 years? Looking for serious answers.
- twayt 5y ago
  Methane has ~25 times the global warming effect as an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide. Source: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/understanding-global-warming-potentials https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/understanding-global-warmin...
  - tangjurine 5y ago
    So methane should be 25 / (120 / 9) = 1.875 times as harmful as CO2 in the long run? How much does the long run matter in this case?
    - twayt 5y ago
      The GWP is computed for a period of 100 years to account for the various half-lives. The 25x figure is normalized over a 100 year period. Over a 20 year period, it is about 85x more harmful
      - drallison 5y ago
        So methane control is a significant handle to control global warming. It is not a solution but it will buy time if we globally "burn" methane to COP2. See BlueDotChange.org.
    - antod 5y ago
      Doesn't methane eventually break down into carbon dioxide? If it does then it's much worse than just being co2 in the first place.
- scroot 5y ago
  The concern is faster warming and an out of control positive feedback loop.
ck2 5y ago
Based on the past two years, good luck with that. Wonder how much damage the billions of gallons of off gassing is costing the country and world from the Bakken fracking fields (North Dakota, eastern Montana) https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/at-night-giant-fields-of-burning-natural-gas-make-north-dakota-visibile-from-space-2533561/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/at-night-giant-fie...
- nerdponx 5y ago
  It seems more like this is the "clathrate gun" hypothesis coming to fruition.
  - taberiand 5y ago
    I think you're right. So many models excluded these extremes as they were too unpredictable in their effects and really, should they happen, it's game over. But so frequently real world observations have been "more extreme, and faster than expected". Well. We had a good run. Time to pack up the board.
akomtu 5y ago
Thete was a related article recently about leaky pipes that leak methane in extraordinary amounts.
hn-sucks 5y ago
changxi_hn 5y ago
bubble_instr 5y ago
- marco_yolo 5y ago
  not enough we have to die and launch our bodies into space
marco_yolo 5y ago
Brajeshwar 5y ago
Climate Scientist, Ilissa Ocko[1], talked about Methane and Climate Change last month at a TED Talk. The video is worth watching - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlWuP7wESZw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlWuP7wESZw 1. https://www.ilissaocko.com https://www.ilissaocko.com
- gumby 5y ago
  BTW she works for the Environmental Defense Fund who will soon be launching a satellite to measure methane (funded by a $100MM grant from Bezos). Despite giving a TED talk she's a serious scientist.
  - Brajeshwar 5y ago
    "Despite giving a TED talk she's a serious scientist." I was actually trying to edit my comment to hone in the fact that the video is a good one despite being on TED. ;-)
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
throwawaysea 5y ago
Many humans. Rich life (individual freedoms and high material quality of life). Low environmental impact. Pick two. EDIT: this apparently is one of my most disliked comments. To clarify, my point is that we can’t have both unlimited population growth and a high quality of life without accepting environmental impacts. If a high population of people have to crowd into dense micro apartments and give up cars and face constant bans on things they like, then their environmental footprint may reduce but their quality of life will go down. On the other hand if population controls were instituted, then a high quality of life could be possible with a sustainable level of environmental impact.
- aero-glide2 5y ago
  4 : space colonies
  - Johnny555 5y ago
    If we can't live comfortably on earth (even with the worst expected effects from climate change), how can we live on another planet or in outer space which has a far less hospitable environment than any climate change could cause here on earth. I think of space colonies as being protection from some catastrophic event on earth, not as an answer to climate change. It's not like we could move significant numbers of people off the planet... and if we can build a spaceship or habitat on another planet that people can survive (and thrive) in, it would be much much easier to build the same habitat here on earth. I would bet that even building an underwater city would be much easier than a moon colony or orbiting space station.
    - brippalcharrid 5y ago
      It means creating such an abundance of technology that we will be able to supplant the limitations that we are currently operating under so that we can fundamentally alter our opportunities as a species. Rather than spending the next few hundred years going round and round in ever-decreasing circles, obsessing over reducing the human impact on the planet to negligible levels using limited technological advances, while remaining largely inward-looking and ensconced within our gravity well. I find that there's a weird mixture of pessimism (billions will die of starvation within 30 years) and hubris (we need to adopt measure X so that we can achieve Y degrees of warming by 2050, rather than Y+1 degrees) that has categorised the more prominent Malthusian technocrats over the last few decades (such as the Club of Rome, and then the IPCC).
galacticaactual 5y ago
Tell China.
fsloth 5y ago
Uh oh, time to prepare to spray sulphur particles to upper atmosphere?
- rjknight 5y ago
  To add to this a bit: if increased atmospheric heat is _causing_ the release of greenhouse gases, then directly reducing the temperature of the atmosphere might be the only way to slow down that release. Secondly, since there is a positive feedback loop here, the earlier and more decisively we act to directly reduce the temperature, the less such geoengineering we will need to do. Right now we only need to counteract X parts per million of methane in the atmosphere, but in the future we would need to counteract X+Y parts per million, necessitating a bigger geoengineering response.
philshem 5y ago
Here's a related, recent New Yorker article about the melting permafrost. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/17/the-great-siberian-thaw https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/17/the-great-sibe... https://archive.is/ZyhPf https://archive.is/ZyhPf > Over thousands of years, the frozen earth swallowed up all manner of organic material, from tree stumps to woolly mammoths. As the permafrost thaws, microbes in the soil awaken and begin to feast on the defrosting biomass. It’s a funky, organic process, akin to unplugging your freezer and leaving the door open, only to return a day later to see that the chicken breasts in the back have begun to rot. In the case of permafrost, this microbial digestion releases a constant belch of carbon dioxide and methane. Scientific models suggest that the permafrost contains one and a half trillion tons of carbon, twice as much as is currently held in Earth’s atmosphere.
- misja111 5y ago
  But doesn't the article suggest that the recent rapid rise comes from methane produced by microbes? If this is true, it is not the melting permafrost, but (intensive) agriculture that is the culprit. > But since 2007, when methane levels began to rise more rapidly again, the proportion of methane containing 13C began to fall (see ‘The rise and fall of methane’). Some researchers believe that this suggests that much of the increase in the past 15 years might be due to bacterial sources, rather than the extraction of fossil fuels.
  - it_does_follow 5y ago
    Isn't the methane in permafrost produced by microbes? It's basically wet lands that ended up being frozen, and as they thaw they go back to releasing the methane being processed by the breakdown of organic matter from microbes.
    - misja111 5y ago
      Not necessarily, it also comes from natural gas: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/32/e2107632118#:~:text=Methane%20cannot%20only%20be%20produced,and%20released%20when%20it%20thaws https://www.pnas.org/content/118/32/e2107632118#:~:text=Meth....
Proven 5y ago
gumby 5y ago
Note: I work at a startup working on removing methane from the atmosphere. Responding to several comments: yes, we need to get rid of the excess CO2. In fact when CH4 is broken down (mostly via hydroxyl† or, over oceans, Cl reactions) you end up with CO2 anyway. So, as you ask, why worry about CH4? The radiative forcing function of CH4 is, depending on your baseline, 30-80X‡ worse than C02. The rise in methane levels from 750 ppbv to 1900 ppbv is believed to have raised the temperature by as much as 0.5 C. So eliminating it buys more time to work on other problems. The second problem is you can't really eliminate* emissions -- they come from diverse sources, almost all of them natural. You can see this in that the 750 ppbv level that was reasonably flat before the widespread adoption of the steam engine (around 1775 when Watt and Boulton got their patent)** -- emission and oxidation/removal were roughly balanced. Another way to look at it is that 1900 ppbv today was all emitted over the last decade, whether "naturally" or not. I put "naturally" in quotation marks because yes, some would be emitted anyway without humans, but most of the emissions that come from humans are from biological activity that would not otherwise have occurred: primarily agriculture, but also fossil fuel extraction. If we somehow stopped all the latter it would cut anthropogenic emission by perhaps a third; livestock maybe the same amount, or maybe half in aggregate. But you aren't going to stop growing crops or dumping stuff in landfill. And many of these sources are quite diffuse; oilfields result in lots of seepage, and who can fit a catalytic converter to a swamp? And of course methane bursts from melting tundra heating continental shelves and the like -- not sure anybody has an idea how much of that there is. You can see craters from these bursts if you walk around in the arctic. And as the article mentions, it's not just the frozen methane, but as the frozen tundra melts decomposition accelerates. One can imagine a significantly large offshore burst that could wipe out agriculture for a few years -- probably a bad thing if you are a fan of vertebrates. If you want to know what human activity bugs me the most, its not livestock, it's a transition to natural gas (methane, basically) as a "greener" fuel for transport, heating and electricity generation. More gas means more leaks and emissions and further cooking of the planet. And when those ships have been launched and power plants built they'll be in operation for decades because of that's how long they'll take to depreciate. The EU has come out in favor of this; the IMO is encouraging shipping to make the transition, and of course some countries depend on its export. PS: everyone makes cow fart jokes but a point of trivia: it's actually cow burps as the cow is a ruminant. † For unknown reasons OH levels last year seem to have dropped. Eek! ‡ These calculations are arcane, depending on what parameters you're trying to compare. We just use 30X in the company. * There are various projects to eradicate point sources: barns, landfills, some old mines. We need more of that too. ** OK, obviously some coal was burnt before the Boulton and Watt engine and adoption was not instantaneous but you can see the bend right around the end of the 18th century. Edit: add the point about gas being considered a "green" fuel.
nosianu 5y ago
To see both the longer trend (graph), a comparison with the value at the same time the previous year, and the current value for CO2, CH4, N2O, and SF6 I occasionally check the Global Monitoring Laboratory (NOAA): https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends_ch4/ https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends_ch4/ Link to methane, click on one of the four switched at the top for the others. Warning: It always is pretty depressing to visit this site. You can also check out a tab "Growth Rate", for CO2 for example it's https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/gr.html https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/gr.html -- which is even more depressing. Even the rate(!) increases! . So, I'm mid-life, and I do what many might say is actually interesting and useful software work, no standard stuff, lots of new things to design and plan and implement in a small software company I co-founded in a team that works well together. Currently we do most of our work for the health sector. Still, I can't take it too seriously. I look at that data and I think to myself, in a few decades we will have problems, many indirectly from more and more troubled nations who will bear the brunt of the climate change, that that silly little piece of software I write seems meaningless if I start thinking about the bigger picture. I'm not demotivated or depressed, it's more the opposite, I can't feel excited about any achievements because I think that most of what we do, what people do these days, is just keeping busy to avoid facing the bigger reality. The show must go on. I've developed the feeling that what we have, even in the rich countries, is much more fragile than people realize. Unless there is a full stop of digging up any more carbon from below ground, in the form of oil, gas, and coal, and I mean full stop and not just a reduction, the amount of carbon in the above ground carbon cycle is going to keep increasing. No amount of trees planted or most of he other measures proposed will change that. How likely is that to happen?
- useragent86 5y ago
  [flagged]
  - nosianu 5y ago
    What are you talking about? Where did I make an end of the world prediction? It is you who brought that up. Of course nothing is going to end. Nice strawman. You even try to bring COVID into the discussion? What are you doing, and why?
thompson1 5y ago
[dead]
tyronehed 5y ago

241 points by jnord 5y ago

rjbwork 5y ago
Pretty much. We're definitely gonna fail to do anything significant about any of this crap until it forcibly ends the way everyone actually lives their lives.
- twayt 5y ago
  It’s time to mandate a law that requires people in power to take a heroic dose of mushrooms twice a year
  - pengaru 5y ago
    Heroic doses of psychedelics don't seem to prevent Burners from participating in the most absurd gratuitous waste of resources that is every BM event. I'm afraid it's not a panacea.
    - twayt 5y ago
      It’s not for a lack of intention though. Lack of critical thinking and maybe justifying the cost? Yes. But in general it seems to be the fastest route to making people realize that they are not more important than the whole.
  - mistermann 5y ago
    This would make for a good viral meme, how could something like that be pulled off in the real world I wonder?
    - twayt 5y ago
      It has to be done in secret, by purely good intentioned third party that has some sort of leverage over the people in power. This group should have one sole purpose of dosing the people in power and otherwise not be allowed to have any further influence. Until our selection mechanisms choose the purest intentioned people rather than expedient and selfish profiteers, the people in power will be driven to optimize objective functions that aren’t conducive for humanity. In the short term, the best way to fix this would be to reveal what is truly happening around them and force them to confront the consequences of their actions and lack thereof. This is very different from the game they have become so familiar with and content with playing.
      - mistermann 5y ago
        That would be preferable yes, but think about if even the meme gained widespread popularity, especially among the young. If some people could start to wake up and realize how absurd, how fake our so called democracy is, and start to outright mock it and the normies who continue to blindly worship it as our most sacred institution, perhaps we could squeeze a 5% or so improvement in behavior out of them, for a few years anyways until another patch is realized to wipe that belief from people's minds.
0x4d464d48 5y ago
I support the jobs the methane will provide
it_does_follow 5y ago
That should be the new HN tagline, I'm honestly a bit surprised to see this article still on the front page. Usually concerning facts get flagged pretty quickly.
- kecupochren 5y ago
  It now can not be found on the first 4 pages..

gpt5 5y ago

Genuinely curious - while Methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas, isn’t its half life in the atmosphere only 9 years? Wouldn’t this make it far less concerning than CO2 with its half life of 120 years? Looking for serious answers.

twayt 5y ago
Methane has ~25 times the global warming effect as an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide. Source: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/understanding-global-warming-potentials https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/understanding-global-warmin...
- tangjurine 5y ago
  So methane should be 25 / (120 / 9) = 1.875 times as harmful as CO2 in the long run? How much does the long run matter in this case?
  - twayt 5y ago
    The GWP is computed for a period of 100 years to account for the various half-lives. The 25x figure is normalized over a 100 year period. Over a 20 year period, it is about 85x more harmful
    - drallison 5y ago
      So methane control is a significant handle to control global warming. It is not a solution but it will buy time if we globally "burn" methane to COP2. See BlueDotChange.org.
  - antod 5y ago
    Doesn't methane eventually break down into carbon dioxide? If it does then it's much worse than just being co2 in the first place.
scroot 5y ago
The concern is faster warming and an out of control positive feedback loop.

ck2 5y ago

Based on the past two years, good luck with that. Wonder how much damage the billions of gallons of off gassing is costing the country and world from the Bakken fracking fields (North Dakota, eastern Montana) https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/at-night-giant-fields-of-burning-natural-gas-make-north-dakota-visibile-from-space-2533561/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/at-night-giant-fie...

nerdponx 5y ago
It seems more like this is the "clathrate gun" hypothesis coming to fruition.
- taberiand 5y ago
  I think you're right. So many models excluded these extremes as they were too unpredictable in their effects and really, should they happen, it's game over. But so frequently real world observations have been "more extreme, and faster than expected". Well. We had a good run. Time to pack up the board.

akomtu 5y ago

Thete was a related article recently about leaky pipes that leak methane in extraordinary amounts.

hn-sucks 5y ago

changxi_hn 5y ago

bubble_instr 5y ago

marco_yolo 5y ago
not enough we have to die and launch our bodies into space

marco_yolo 5y ago

Brajeshwar 5y ago

Climate Scientist, Ilissa Ocko[1], talked about Methane and Climate Change last month at a TED Talk. The video is worth watching - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlWuP7wESZw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlWuP7wESZw 1. https://www.ilissaocko.com https://www.ilissaocko.com

gumby 5y ago
BTW she works for the Environmental Defense Fund who will soon be launching a satellite to measure methane (funded by a $100MM grant from Bezos). Despite giving a TED talk she's a serious scientist.
- Brajeshwar 5y ago
  "Despite giving a TED talk she's a serious scientist." I was actually trying to edit my comment to hone in the fact that the video is a good one despite being on TED. ;-)
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

throwawaysea 5y ago

Many humans. Rich life (individual freedoms and high material quality of life). Low environmental impact. Pick two. EDIT: this apparently is one of my most disliked comments. To clarify, my point is that we can’t have both unlimited population growth and a high quality of life without accepting environmental impacts. If a high population of people have to crowd into dense micro apartments and give up cars and face constant bans on things they like, then their environmental footprint may reduce but their quality of life will go down. On the other hand if population controls were instituted, then a high quality of life could be possible with a sustainable level of environmental impact.

aero-glide2 5y ago
4 : space colonies
- Johnny555 5y ago
  If we can't live comfortably on earth (even with the worst expected effects from climate change), how can we live on another planet or in outer space which has a far less hospitable environment than any climate change could cause here on earth. I think of space colonies as being protection from some catastrophic event on earth, not as an answer to climate change. It's not like we could move significant numbers of people off the planet... and if we can build a spaceship or habitat on another planet that people can survive (and thrive) in, it would be much much easier to build the same habitat here on earth. I would bet that even building an underwater city would be much easier than a moon colony or orbiting space station.
  - brippalcharrid 5y ago
    It means creating such an abundance of technology that we will be able to supplant the limitations that we are currently operating under so that we can fundamentally alter our opportunities as a species. Rather than spending the next few hundred years going round and round in ever-decreasing circles, obsessing over reducing the human impact on the planet to negligible levels using limited technological advances, while remaining largely inward-looking and ensconced within our gravity well. I find that there's a weird mixture of pessimism (billions will die of starvation within 30 years) and hubris (we need to adopt measure X so that we can achieve Y degrees of warming by 2050, rather than Y+1 degrees) that has categorised the more prominent Malthusian technocrats over the last few decades (such as the Club of Rome, and then the IPCC).

galacticaactual 5y ago

Tell China.

fsloth 5y ago

Uh oh, time to prepare to spray sulphur particles to upper atmosphere?

rjknight 5y ago
To add to this a bit: if increased atmospheric heat is _causing_ the release of greenhouse gases, then directly reducing the temperature of the atmosphere might be the only way to slow down that release. Secondly, since there is a positive feedback loop here, the earlier and more decisively we act to directly reduce the temperature, the less such geoengineering we will need to do. Right now we only need to counteract X parts per million of methane in the atmosphere, but in the future we would need to counteract X+Y parts per million, necessitating a bigger geoengineering response.

philshem 5y ago

Here's a related, recent New Yorker article about the melting permafrost. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/17/the-great-siberian-thaw https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/17/the-great-sibe... https://archive.is/ZyhPf https://archive.is/ZyhPf > Over thousands of years, the frozen earth swallowed up all manner of organic material, from tree stumps to woolly mammoths. As the permafrost thaws, microbes in the soil awaken and begin to feast on the defrosting biomass. It’s a funky, organic process, akin to unplugging your freezer and leaving the door open, only to return a day later to see that the chicken breasts in the back have begun to rot. In the case of permafrost, this microbial digestion releases a constant belch of carbon dioxide and methane. Scientific models suggest that the permafrost contains one and a half trillion tons of carbon, twice as much as is currently held in Earth’s atmosphere.

misja111 5y ago
But doesn't the article suggest that the recent rapid rise comes from methane produced by microbes? If this is true, it is not the melting permafrost, but (intensive) agriculture that is the culprit. > But since 2007, when methane levels began to rise more rapidly again, the proportion of methane containing 13C began to fall (see ‘The rise and fall of methane’). Some researchers believe that this suggests that much of the increase in the past 15 years might be due to bacterial sources, rather than the extraction of fossil fuels.
- it_does_follow 5y ago
  Isn't the methane in permafrost produced by microbes? It's basically wet lands that ended up being frozen, and as they thaw they go back to releasing the methane being processed by the breakdown of organic matter from microbes.
  - misja111 5y ago
    Not necessarily, it also comes from natural gas: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/32/e2107632118#:~:text=Methane%20cannot%20only%20be%20produced,and%20released%20when%20it%20thaws https://www.pnas.org/content/118/32/e2107632118#:~:text=Meth....

Proven 5y ago

gumby 5y ago

Note: I work at a startup working on removing methane from the atmosphere. Responding to several comments: yes, we need to get rid of the excess CO2. In fact when CH4 is broken down (mostly via hydroxyl† or, over oceans, Cl reactions) you end up with CO2 anyway. So, as you ask, why worry about CH4? The radiative forcing function of CH4 is, depending on your baseline, 30-80X‡ worse than C02. The rise in methane levels from 750 ppbv to 1900 ppbv is believed to have raised the temperature by as much as 0.5 C. So eliminating it buys more time to work on other problems. The second problem is you can't really eliminate* emissions -- they come from diverse sources, almost all of them natural. You can see this in that the 750 ppbv level that was reasonably flat before the widespread adoption of the steam engine (around 1775 when Watt and Boulton got their patent)** -- emission and oxidation/removal were roughly balanced. Another way to look at it is that 1900 ppbv today was all emitted over the last decade, whether "naturally" or not. I put "naturally" in quotation marks because yes, some would be emitted anyway without humans, but most of the emissions that come from humans are from biological activity that would not otherwise have occurred: primarily agriculture, but also fossil fuel extraction. If we somehow stopped all the latter it would cut anthropogenic emission by perhaps a third; livestock maybe the same amount, or maybe half in aggregate. But you aren't going to stop growing crops or dumping stuff in landfill. And many of these sources are quite diffuse; oilfields result in lots of seepage, and who can fit a catalytic converter to a swamp? And of course methane bursts from melting tundra heating continental shelves and the like -- not sure anybody has an idea how much of that there is. You can see craters from these bursts if you walk around in the arctic. And as the article mentions, it's not just the frozen methane, but as the frozen tundra melts decomposition accelerates. One can imagine a significantly large offshore burst that could wipe out agriculture for a few years -- probably a bad thing if you are a fan of vertebrates. If you want to know what human activity bugs me the most, its not livestock, it's a transition to natural gas (methane, basically) as a "greener" fuel for transport, heating and electricity generation. More gas means more leaks and emissions and further cooking of the planet. And when those ships have been launched and power plants built they'll be in operation for decades because of that's how long they'll take to depreciate. The EU has come out in favor of this; the IMO is encouraging shipping to make the transition, and of course some countries depend on its export. PS: everyone makes cow fart jokes but a point of trivia: it's actually cow burps as the cow is a ruminant. † For unknown reasons OH levels last year seem to have dropped. Eek! ‡ These calculations are arcane, depending on what parameters you're trying to compare. We just use 30X in the company. * There are various projects to eradicate point sources: barns, landfills, some old mines. We need more of that too. ** OK, obviously some coal was burnt before the Boulton and Watt engine and adoption was not instantaneous but you can see the bend right around the end of the 18th century. Edit: add the point about gas being considered a "green" fuel.

nosianu 5y ago

To see both the longer trend (graph), a comparison with the value at the same time the previous year, and the current value for CO2, CH4, N2O, and SF6 I occasionally check the Global Monitoring Laboratory (NOAA): https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends_ch4/ https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends_ch4/ Link to methane, click on one of the four switched at the top for the others. Warning: It always is pretty depressing to visit this site. You can also check out a tab "Growth Rate", for CO2 for example it's https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/gr.html https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/gr.html -- which is even more depressing. Even the rate(!) increases! . So, I'm mid-life, and I do what many might say is actually interesting and useful software work, no standard stuff, lots of new things to design and plan and implement in a small software company I co-founded in a team that works well together. Currently we do most of our work for the health sector. Still, I can't take it too seriously. I look at that data and I think to myself, in a few decades we will have problems, many indirectly from more and more troubled nations who will bear the brunt of the climate change, that that silly little piece of software I write seems meaningless if I start thinking about the bigger picture. I'm not demotivated or depressed, it's more the opposite, I can't feel excited about any achievements because I think that most of what we do, what people do these days, is just keeping busy to avoid facing the bigger reality. The show must go on. I've developed the feeling that what we have, even in the rich countries, is much more fragile than people realize. Unless there is a full stop of digging up any more carbon from below ground, in the form of oil, gas, and coal, and I mean full stop and not just a reduction, the amount of carbon in the above ground carbon cycle is going to keep increasing. No amount of trees planted or most of he other measures proposed will change that. How likely is that to happen?

useragent86 5y ago
[flagged]
- nosianu 5y ago
  What are you talking about? Where did I make an end of the world prediction? It is you who brought that up. Of course nothing is going to end. Nice strawman. You even try to bring COVID into the discussion? What are you doing, and why?

thompson1 5y ago

[dead]

tyronehed 5y ago