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Methane naturally turns into CO2 in the atmosphere. Even if it did increase warming more than CO2, once methane emissions reach a steady level, reducing methane

Methane naturally turns into CO2 in the atmosphere. Even if it did increase warming more than CO2, once methane emissions reach a steady level, reducing methane emissions won't change a thing, compared to CO2 emissions. This is also similar to meat production emissions. Most of carbon emissions in meat productions are of carbon which was captured from the air as a part of the production cycle, by the plants which feed the cattle. The narrative is extremely misleading.

djleni 4y ago
Could you explain further? How does: > reducing methane emissions won't change a thing, compared to CO2 emissions. Follow from: > once methane emissions reach a steady level
- xyzzyz 4y ago
  Methane in atmosphere today is at 2 ppm, carbon dioxide is at 420 ppm. If methane is 20 times more potent, this implies that atmospheric methane is equivalent to 40 extra ppm of carbon dioxide. If we removed literally all methane from the atmosphere, this would be equivalent to reducing carbon dioxide concentration to 380 ppm. This would bring us back to climate of 2005. By any reasonable measure, climate in 2023 is not significantly different than the climate in 2005 (eg. you’d hardly be able to observe any difference without making a lot of very careful measurements, you wouldn’t “feel” any difference on your own skin). And that’s if we remove literally all methane. Most of the methane in atmosphere is a result of natural processes, not caused by human activity. Thus, if we stop all methane emissions caused by human activity, we can maybe at best slow down climate change by 10 years. In terms of practical effects as felt by human beings, this is accurately described as “won’t change a thing”. Actually, to be more specific, slowing climate change by 10 years won’t make any difference, but stopping all methane emitting activities would be tremendously negative to human flourishing.
  - myshpa 4y ago
    > climate in 2023 is not significantly different than the climate in 2005 'Devastating' melt of Greenland, Antarctic ice sheets found https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35657570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35657570 This was here just yesterday. You may not feel it "on your own skin", but Earth does. And what exactly will happen when we'll lose all ice, we simply do not know. We just know it won't be pretty. > stopping all methane emitting activities would be tremendously negative to human flourishing How? I smell bullsh*t.
    - revelio 4y ago
      Antarctic sea ice extent is currently at the same level it was at this time of year in 1980, actually a little higher. Use Charctic to see for yourself: https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph/ https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-... Arctic sea ice extent is currently tracking the 2010-2020 average. Nothing much is happening in terms of Arctic sea ice extent at the moment and that's been true for a while. There has been a steady decline since 1979, which is the earliest year Charctic shows. But data exists for much longer. This is unfortunately standard for climatology, they truncate many data sets starting at this time and then declare records based on that truncated data set. That's not because nobody cared about the poles before the 80s, people definitely did. Here are some examples. In the 1990 IPCC report, we can see satellite data for the Arctic going back to ~1972 and it shows a huge rise in sea ice extent during that decade ([1], p224, figure 7.20). This data is no longer shown on modern graphs. This 1985 report [2] is by the US Department of Energy "Office of Basic Sciences Carbon Dioxide Research Division", it covers many topics around the construction of global climate models. Figure 5.2 on page 181 shows data on sea ice extents going back to the 1920s, citing Vinnikov et al. It shows a massive fall in sea ice from the 1920s to about 1955, when it turns around and starts climbing again. This data is corroborated by news reports. In the 1920s there were reports about melting ice caps. These were the dustbowl years and the 20s-30s were very hot. But in the middle of the century that turned around and by the mid 1960s the climate had been cooling for decades. The NYT reported [3] that: The United States and the Soviet Union are mounting large‐scale investigations to determine why the Arctic climate is becoming more frigid, why parts of the Arctic sea ice have recently become ominously thicker and whether the extent of that ice cover contributes to the onset of ice ages. Sea ice continued to thicken and by 1975 newspapers were reporting a consensus of experts that the future had a lot more ice in it, claims made credible by the growing Arctic ice conditions [4]: In the last decade, the Arctic ice and snow cap has expanded 12%, and for the first time this century ships making for Iceland ports have been impeded by drifting sea ice [...] Many climatologists see this as evidence that a significant shift in climate is taking place [....] No scientists are predicting a full-scale Ice Age soon, but some predict that in a few decades there might be little ice ages So the Arctic and Antarctic have changed quite a bit in the 20th century. They grow, they shrink, and scientists know this but no longer are willing to show these old datasets because the picture they paint is not a very interesting one. It certainly would not convince anyone that climatology is the key to saving the planet from doom. [1] https://archive.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/far/wg_I/ipcc_far_wg_I_chapter_07.pdf https://archive.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/far/wg_I/ipcc_far_wg_I_c... [2] https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/5885458 https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/5885458 [3] https://www.nytimes.com/1970/07/18/archives/us-and-soviet-press-studies-of-a-colder-arctic-us-and-soviet-press.html?_r=0 https://www.nytimes.com/1970/07/18/archives/us-and-soviet-pr... [4] https://chicagotribune.newspapers.com/search/?query=%20new%20ice%20age&ymd=1975-03-02 https://chicagotribune.newspapers.com/search/?query=%20new%2...
  - tpnCC 3y ago
    There is a detail missing in your Calculation. Global Warming Potential of Methane over a 20 year Time period is a bit more than 80 times that of CO2. https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/understanding-global-warming-potentials https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/understanding-global-warmin... So, redrawing your path by your method, if we remove ALL of the Atmospheric Methane today, we would be reducing GHG concentrations by about 160ppm CO2 equivalent, which takes the overall CO2 concentrations to less than that of pre-industrial levels(280ppm), 260ppm. This negates your conclusion that we would hardly observe ANY difference. If we remove literally all of the Methane today, we would have solved Global warming from the perspective of concentration of Green House gases and will just have to wait and watch for the Global Temperatures to catch up (meaning they will go down).
    - xyzzyz 3y ago
      > Global Warming Potential of Methane over a 20 year Time period is a bit more than 80 times that of CO2. Where in the linked document it says that? Because I do not think it’s true.
      - tpnCC 3y ago
        2nd para beneath the side heading: "Are there alternatives to the 100-year GWP for comparing GHGs?" GWP calculations has been an active area of research for a long time. For instance, if you look up the table beneath the VALUES side-heading in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_potential https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_potential, you would notice that from 1995IPCC to the recent one, Scientists are getting more and more closer to ~80 GWP.
  - BlueTemplar 3y ago
    Where did you get the idea that most of the methane is from natural processes ? (Same for people that seem to think that most of anthropogenic ones are from livestock?) Also some of the "natural" causes are suspect now, since they include things like permafrost thaw, which itself is caused by warming...
- mlyle 4y ago
  If you release the same amount of methane per year for a couple dozen years, the methane reaches a steady state where it has a constant value, but CO2 continues to rise. This is because the methane is being converted to CO2 at a relatively quick clip. The timescale for CO2 is larger-- centuries.
  - hkt 4y ago
    Methane - CH4 - degrades to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. A quick clip, however, it is not: it can take 20 years, during which that single carbon atom yields 20x the global warming potential as part of a methane molecule than it does as part of a carbon dioxide molecule.
    - mlyle 4y ago
      The point is, if emissions are steady state for a bit more than 20 years, the amount of CH4 remains constant. It will be removed from the atmosphere at the same rate it is added. It takes centuries or more for CO2 to reach equilibrium. Indeed, this means most of the warming you get from emitting a molecule of CH4 is after it has decayed to the more stable CO2. Of course, sharp increases in methane are of concern for dynamic effects, from things like permafrost thaw.
    - tremon 3y ago
      it can take 20 years, during which that single carbon atom yields 20x the global warming potential Actually, it's more than that. The 20x global warming potential of CH4 is based on a 100-year average, which is the yardstick unit of measurement in the scientific literature. But as you say, methane degrades in 20 years so its average-20x contribution happens within those 20 years: > The IPCC reports that the global warming potential (GWP) for methane is about 84 in terms of its impact over a 20-year timeframe [..] and 105 times the effect when accounting for aerosol interactions -- from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane?useskin=timeless https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane?useskin=ti...
- ackfoobar 4y ago
  For a more rigorous approach (of this naiive modelling), here are the differential equations. https://cleantechnica.com/2021/02/06/a-differential-equation-governing-methane-concentration-in-the-atmosphere/ https://cleantechnica.com/2021/02/06/a-differential-equation...
orev 4y ago
Plants that feed the cattle are overwhelmingly fertilized using fertilizer derived from petroleum products, so it’s not an accurate picture that the feed plants are carbon capture methods.
- kvgr 4y ago
  All plants we eat are fertilized. We can stop fertilizing and all die.
  - throwaway09223 4y ago
    Yes, but the problem is that meat consumes approximately 25 plant calories to produce 1 meat calorie. It's a reducing function, which means calorie for calorie meat produces 25 times as much greenhouse gas simply from the costs involved in plant production. This isn't universally true - some meat is grown by grazing "free" plant calories. But it is true for grain fed cattle -- for most US industrial meat production. The methane production issue is in addition to the plant/meat production inefficiencies.
    - verdverm 4y ago
      There are nutrients and amino acids only found in meat. Where do you get the replacement for this, what does that process look like, are they even metabolically equivalent?
      - galangalalgol 4y ago
        There are no amino acids only found in meat. B12 is mostly only found in animal products, but some fungi have it. As to metabolic equivalency, that is a very good question, studies so far indicate the accessibility of amino acids in plants to the human metabolic pathways varies within our species somewhat widely.
        smooc 3y ago
        B12 is found in animal products because it's added to their diet. It doesn't come natural them. B12 you get from eating dirt, which we don't like to do.
culopatin 4y ago
I don’t understand this logic or the wording. Methane = increase in Co2 Reducing methane = no effect But reducing Co2 yes? Why wouldn’t reducing methane change anything? Following your logic reducing Methane is reducing Co2, no?
- 411111111111111 4y ago
  The argument is that there is a set quantity of co2/methane in circulation. The meat industry supposedly isn't increasing the amount on a yearly basis. By that logic the only climate change relevant source of greenhouse gases are ones that introduce new ones into the circle, which is pretty much only burning fossil fuel. It's a pretty old argument that holds some truth, (the fossil fuels are the biggest issue) but is also been debunked by people much smarter then me
  - culopatin 4y ago
    Are you saying that the claim is that meat industry is extracting as much Co2 as they contribute?
    - stametseater 4y ago
      Specifically with respect to the methane cow farts, yes. That carbon comes from their plant diet (be it grass in a field or grain in a feeding lot), and the carbon in those plants came from the atmosphere. This isn't counting the fossil fuels the industry also burns, or the carbon released during the production of fertilizers used when growing that feed. But the carbon in the feed itself all comes from the atmosphere, and therefore the carbon in the methane emitted by cows comes from the atmosphere.
      - fortysixdegrees 4y ago
        Yea but grass doesn't grown on methane
        4y ago
gonzo41 4y ago
It takes 10 years for that to happen. So the effect in the short term is 20 time more greenhouse gas effect. If we stopped producing CH4 now, it'd be 10 years to see the drop back to co2 levels.
- Retric 4y ago
  Cutting CH4 is useful for fighting climate change, but in a different way than cutting CO2. In terms of climate change it’s not a 10 years thing and then methane instantly swaps, it’s a second by second thing where a percentage of existing methane is constantly converted. In steady state new methane from say cow farts 1:1 replaces methane from past cow farts being transformed into CO2. The only difference is an atom of CH4 at 16.043 grams per mol weigh less than an atom of CO2 at 44.009 grams per mol. Though many sources of CH4 start by extracting atmospheric CO2, natural gas leaks don’t. The critical difference is if we cut net CO2 and hold methane steady the atmosphere stops warming, where cutting methane and CO2 would actually cool the atmosphere. Put another way NEW sources of methane are different because it takes multiple years to reach an equilibrium. In the first years they have a very big impact, but eventually it falls off until eventually a constant source of CO2 may actually have a larger impact.
  - gonzo41 4y ago
    I'm more worried about untracked CH4 leaks from coal mines and LNG projects. Which dwarf farm emissions. Cow's are just part of the problem. The real threat is the LNG industry.
    - Retric 4y ago
      We can track methane concentrations from satellites so there really isn’t significant unknown sources. https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Copernicus/Sentinel-5P/Mapping_methane_emissions_on_a_global_scale https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Coperni...
    - iamthemonster 3y ago
      Methane emissions from oil and gas are enormously variable depending on what kind of upstream production facilities you have. Norway's methane emissions from oil and gas are negligible, and a couple of orders of magnitude better than the worst offenders, which are Russia and the US. Why the US? Shale gas is based on an enormous number of gas wells with a short lifetime each. It's not economical to provide power and compressed air at each of these shale gas wells, so they use the pressure of the natural gas as the energy source to actuate their valves and pump liquids. That means the gas is vented to the atmosphere. And any liquids storage is in tanks which have no blanketing, so any evaporation and associated gas goes straight to the atmosphere. US shale gas has incredibly high methane intensity. Not quite as bad as Russia, but worse than the rest of the world, including Saudia Arabia. LNG plants themselves tend to have fairly low methane emissions. If you go to Qatar or Australia, the other two leading LNG exporters, their CO2 emissions will be high, but due to their upstream facilities they will have a tiny fraction of the methane emissions of US production. But it's cheaper and easier to just engage in finger-wagging, pledges and vague ESG-inspired aspirations that to pay more for less-GHG-intensive LNG, so nothing will change in the short term.
bjoli 4y ago
And you don't think the FAO reports that are most often quoted (Livestock's long shadow, and Tackling climate change through livestock) didn't take the biogenic carbon cycle into account? Come on.
dataflow 3y ago
> Methane naturally turns into CO2 in the atmosphere After how long? A half-life of a decade, as I understand it? Not exactly the order of magnitude of luxury time we have to spare. > Even if it did increase warming more than CO2 "Even if it did" is strange wording for an established fact. Do you write "even if the sky was blue"? > once methane emissions reach a steady level, reducing methane emissions won't change a thing It's kind of really, really important how high that "steady level" is and how fast we'd reach it though, no? We're not just worried about life 1,000 years from now. We're worried about life 20 years from now. > The narrative is extremely misleading. I find this statement strange after reading your comment.
- himinlomax 3y ago
  > After how long? A half-life of a decade, as I understand it? Not exactly the order of magnitude of luxury time we have to spare Doesn't matter, if we keep the number of heads of cattle constant, the methane from them in the atmosphere will be constant. If we keep using the same number of ICE cars otoh, the CO2 from them in the atmosphere will keep increasing. We would have to drop the number of ICE cars to 0 to stop the increase.
  - cesnja 3y ago
    If the amount of methane in the atmosphere is constant, the CO2 from that in the atmosphere will keep increasing.
    - ant6n 3y ago
      Well unless there‘s a closed loop co2 - soy - animal - co2/methane - co2. Meat production will involve fossil fuels tho.
    - codethief 3y ago
      As the sibling already said: We're in a closed loop. Methane decomposes into CO2, so if you want to maintain a constant level of methane in the atmosphere, energy/mass conservation dictates that this carbon needs to come from somewhere else. Solution: It actually comes from the CO2, via grass growth & the cattle's digestive system. The amount of CO2, averaged over time, therefore cannot increase.
ramblenode 3y ago
You make a good point about animal-based carbon emissions being a closed loop, but I don't think your conclusion that this loop doesn't accelerate the greenhouse effect is correct. Methane degrades to C02 in 1-1 proportion. So at any time, if more atmospheric carbon is concentrated as methane than as C02 then the greenhouse effect will be stronger at that time (because methane is a stronger GHG). If agriculture removes 1 unit of C02 from the atmosphere (from feedstock) and emits 1 unit of methane (from cow) then total atmospheric carbon is unchanged but the proportion of methane, and therefore the total GHG effect, is increased at that time. Summing over time, and you get an increase in overall heat that has been trapped.
- ftrobro 3y ago
  > I don't think your conclusion that this loop doesn't accelerate the greenhouse effect is correct It's not like mammalian herbivores are a recent invention. If a constant amount of mammalian herbivores in the world would cause a constant acceleration of greenhouse effect then the greenhouse effect would have increased exponentially for millions of years already. That has not been the case. If you increase the number of mammalian herbivores in the world then the greenhouse effect will increase for about a decade because of increasing levels of methane. After a decade, the methane level (and therefore the greenhouse effect) will have found a new (higher) equilibrium and no longer increase.
  - phtrivier 3y ago
    It's not new, but the number has hardly stayed constant, since at some point humanity started mass herding. And, also, we kinda quadrupled the cheptel size in 50 years ? https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production#global-meat-production https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production#global-meat-produ... (To be fair, I was expecting more, and I was again astonished by the relative numbers of cattle vs poultry)
    - whythre 3y ago
      We have increased farming, but the American plains were there once home to vast herds of bison. Basically there’s been 30 million large ungulates there for a very long time.

djleni 4y ago

Could you explain further? How does: > reducing methane emissions won't change a thing, compared to CO2 emissions. Follow from: > once methane emissions reach a steady level

xyzzyz 4y ago
Methane in atmosphere today is at 2 ppm, carbon dioxide is at 420 ppm. If methane is 20 times more potent, this implies that atmospheric methane is equivalent to 40 extra ppm of carbon dioxide. If we removed literally all methane from the atmosphere, this would be equivalent to reducing carbon dioxide concentration to 380 ppm. This would bring us back to climate of 2005. By any reasonable measure, climate in 2023 is not significantly different than the climate in 2005 (eg. you’d hardly be able to observe any difference without making a lot of very careful measurements, you wouldn’t “feel” any difference on your own skin). And that’s if we remove literally all methane. Most of the methane in atmosphere is a result of natural processes, not caused by human activity. Thus, if we stop all methane emissions caused by human activity, we can maybe at best slow down climate change by 10 years. In terms of practical effects as felt by human beings, this is accurately described as “won’t change a thing”. Actually, to be more specific, slowing climate change by 10 years won’t make any difference, but stopping all methane emitting activities would be tremendously negative to human flourishing.
- myshpa 4y ago
  > climate in 2023 is not significantly different than the climate in 2005 'Devastating' melt of Greenland, Antarctic ice sheets found https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35657570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35657570 This was here just yesterday. You may not feel it "on your own skin", but Earth does. And what exactly will happen when we'll lose all ice, we simply do not know. We just know it won't be pretty. > stopping all methane emitting activities would be tremendously negative to human flourishing How? I smell bullsh*t.
  - revelio 4y ago
    Antarctic sea ice extent is currently at the same level it was at this time of year in 1980, actually a little higher. Use Charctic to see for yourself: https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph/ https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-... Arctic sea ice extent is currently tracking the 2010-2020 average. Nothing much is happening in terms of Arctic sea ice extent at the moment and that's been true for a while. There has been a steady decline since 1979, which is the earliest year Charctic shows. But data exists for much longer. This is unfortunately standard for climatology, they truncate many data sets starting at this time and then declare records based on that truncated data set. That's not because nobody cared about the poles before the 80s, people definitely did. Here are some examples. In the 1990 IPCC report, we can see satellite data for the Arctic going back to ~1972 and it shows a huge rise in sea ice extent during that decade ([1], p224, figure 7.20). This data is no longer shown on modern graphs. This 1985 report [2] is by the US Department of Energy "Office of Basic Sciences Carbon Dioxide Research Division", it covers many topics around the construction of global climate models. Figure 5.2 on page 181 shows data on sea ice extents going back to the 1920s, citing Vinnikov et al. It shows a massive fall in sea ice from the 1920s to about 1955, when it turns around and starts climbing again. This data is corroborated by news reports. In the 1920s there were reports about melting ice caps. These were the dustbowl years and the 20s-30s were very hot. But in the middle of the century that turned around and by the mid 1960s the climate had been cooling for decades. The NYT reported [3] that: The United States and the Soviet Union are mounting large‐scale investigations to determine why the Arctic climate is becoming more frigid, why parts of the Arctic sea ice have recently become ominously thicker and whether the extent of that ice cover contributes to the onset of ice ages. Sea ice continued to thicken and by 1975 newspapers were reporting a consensus of experts that the future had a lot more ice in it, claims made credible by the growing Arctic ice conditions [4]: In the last decade, the Arctic ice and snow cap has expanded 12%, and for the first time this century ships making for Iceland ports have been impeded by drifting sea ice [...] Many climatologists see this as evidence that a significant shift in climate is taking place [....] No scientists are predicting a full-scale Ice Age soon, but some predict that in a few decades there might be little ice ages So the Arctic and Antarctic have changed quite a bit in the 20th century. They grow, they shrink, and scientists know this but no longer are willing to show these old datasets because the picture they paint is not a very interesting one. It certainly would not convince anyone that climatology is the key to saving the planet from doom. [1] https://archive.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/far/wg_I/ipcc_far_wg_I_chapter_07.pdf https://archive.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/far/wg_I/ipcc_far_wg_I_c... [2] https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/5885458 https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/5885458 [3] https://www.nytimes.com/1970/07/18/archives/us-and-soviet-press-studies-of-a-colder-arctic-us-and-soviet-press.html?_r=0 https://www.nytimes.com/1970/07/18/archives/us-and-soviet-pr... [4] https://chicagotribune.newspapers.com/search/?query=%20new%20ice%20age&ymd=1975-03-02 https://chicagotribune.newspapers.com/search/?query=%20new%2...
- tpnCC 3y ago
  There is a detail missing in your Calculation. Global Warming Potential of Methane over a 20 year Time period is a bit more than 80 times that of CO2. https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/understanding-global-warming-potentials https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/understanding-global-warmin... So, redrawing your path by your method, if we remove ALL of the Atmospheric Methane today, we would be reducing GHG concentrations by about 160ppm CO2 equivalent, which takes the overall CO2 concentrations to less than that of pre-industrial levels(280ppm), 260ppm. This negates your conclusion that we would hardly observe ANY difference. If we remove literally all of the Methane today, we would have solved Global warming from the perspective of concentration of Green House gases and will just have to wait and watch for the Global Temperatures to catch up (meaning they will go down).
  - xyzzyz 3y ago
    > Global Warming Potential of Methane over a 20 year Time period is a bit more than 80 times that of CO2. Where in the linked document it says that? Because I do not think it’s true.
    - tpnCC 3y ago
      2nd para beneath the side heading: "Are there alternatives to the 100-year GWP for comparing GHGs?" GWP calculations has been an active area of research for a long time. For instance, if you look up the table beneath the VALUES side-heading in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_potential https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_potential, you would notice that from 1995IPCC to the recent one, Scientists are getting more and more closer to ~80 GWP.
- BlueTemplar 3y ago
  Where did you get the idea that most of the methane is from natural processes ? (Same for people that seem to think that most of anthropogenic ones are from livestock?) Also some of the "natural" causes are suspect now, since they include things like permafrost thaw, which itself is caused by warming...
mlyle 4y ago
If you release the same amount of methane per year for a couple dozen years, the methane reaches a steady state where it has a constant value, but CO2 continues to rise. This is because the methane is being converted to CO2 at a relatively quick clip. The timescale for CO2 is larger-- centuries.
- hkt 4y ago
  Methane - CH4 - degrades to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. A quick clip, however, it is not: it can take 20 years, during which that single carbon atom yields 20x the global warming potential as part of a methane molecule than it does as part of a carbon dioxide molecule.
  - mlyle 4y ago
    The point is, if emissions are steady state for a bit more than 20 years, the amount of CH4 remains constant. It will be removed from the atmosphere at the same rate it is added. It takes centuries or more for CO2 to reach equilibrium. Indeed, this means most of the warming you get from emitting a molecule of CH4 is after it has decayed to the more stable CO2. Of course, sharp increases in methane are of concern for dynamic effects, from things like permafrost thaw.
  - tremon 3y ago
    it can take 20 years, during which that single carbon atom yields 20x the global warming potential Actually, it's more than that. The 20x global warming potential of CH4 is based on a 100-year average, which is the yardstick unit of measurement in the scientific literature. But as you say, methane degrades in 20 years so its average-20x contribution happens within those 20 years: > The IPCC reports that the global warming potential (GWP) for methane is about 84 in terms of its impact over a 20-year timeframe [..] and 105 times the effect when accounting for aerosol interactions -- from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane?useskin=timeless https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane?useskin=ti...
ackfoobar 4y ago
For a more rigorous approach (of this naiive modelling), here are the differential equations. https://cleantechnica.com/2021/02/06/a-differential-equation-governing-methane-concentration-in-the-atmosphere/ https://cleantechnica.com/2021/02/06/a-differential-equation...

orev 4y ago

Plants that feed the cattle are overwhelmingly fertilized using fertilizer derived from petroleum products, so it’s not an accurate picture that the feed plants are carbon capture methods.

kvgr 4y ago
All plants we eat are fertilized. We can stop fertilizing and all die.
- throwaway09223 4y ago
  Yes, but the problem is that meat consumes approximately 25 plant calories to produce 1 meat calorie. It's a reducing function, which means calorie for calorie meat produces 25 times as much greenhouse gas simply from the costs involved in plant production. This isn't universally true - some meat is grown by grazing "free" plant calories. But it is true for grain fed cattle -- for most US industrial meat production. The methane production issue is in addition to the plant/meat production inefficiencies.
  - verdverm 4y ago
    There are nutrients and amino acids only found in meat. Where do you get the replacement for this, what does that process look like, are they even metabolically equivalent?
    - galangalalgol 4y ago
      There are no amino acids only found in meat. B12 is mostly only found in animal products, but some fungi have it. As to metabolic equivalency, that is a very good question, studies so far indicate the accessibility of amino acids in plants to the human metabolic pathways varies within our species somewhat widely.
      - smooc 3y ago
        B12 is found in animal products because it's added to their diet. It doesn't come natural them. B12 you get from eating dirt, which we don't like to do.

culopatin 4y ago

I don’t understand this logic or the wording. Methane = increase in Co2 Reducing methane = no effect But reducing Co2 yes? Why wouldn’t reducing methane change anything? Following your logic reducing Methane is reducing Co2, no?

411111111111111 4y ago
The argument is that there is a set quantity of co2/methane in circulation. The meat industry supposedly isn't increasing the amount on a yearly basis. By that logic the only climate change relevant source of greenhouse gases are ones that introduce new ones into the circle, which is pretty much only burning fossil fuel. It's a pretty old argument that holds some truth, (the fossil fuels are the biggest issue) but is also been debunked by people much smarter then me
- culopatin 4y ago
  Are you saying that the claim is that meat industry is extracting as much Co2 as they contribute?
  - stametseater 4y ago
    Specifically with respect to the methane cow farts, yes. That carbon comes from their plant diet (be it grass in a field or grain in a feeding lot), and the carbon in those plants came from the atmosphere. This isn't counting the fossil fuels the industry also burns, or the carbon released during the production of fertilizers used when growing that feed. But the carbon in the feed itself all comes from the atmosphere, and therefore the carbon in the methane emitted by cows comes from the atmosphere.
    - fortysixdegrees 4y ago
      Yea but grass doesn't grown on methane
      - 4y ago

gonzo41 4y ago

It takes 10 years for that to happen. So the effect in the short term is 20 time more greenhouse gas effect. If we stopped producing CH4 now, it'd be 10 years to see the drop back to co2 levels.

Retric 4y ago
Cutting CH4 is useful for fighting climate change, but in a different way than cutting CO2. In terms of climate change it’s not a 10 years thing and then methane instantly swaps, it’s a second by second thing where a percentage of existing methane is constantly converted. In steady state new methane from say cow farts 1:1 replaces methane from past cow farts being transformed into CO2. The only difference is an atom of CH4 at 16.043 grams per mol weigh less than an atom of CO2 at 44.009 grams per mol. Though many sources of CH4 start by extracting atmospheric CO2, natural gas leaks don’t. The critical difference is if we cut net CO2 and hold methane steady the atmosphere stops warming, where cutting methane and CO2 would actually cool the atmosphere. Put another way NEW sources of methane are different because it takes multiple years to reach an equilibrium. In the first years they have a very big impact, but eventually it falls off until eventually a constant source of CO2 may actually have a larger impact.
- gonzo41 4y ago
  I'm more worried about untracked CH4 leaks from coal mines and LNG projects. Which dwarf farm emissions. Cow's are just part of the problem. The real threat is the LNG industry.
  - Retric 4y ago
    We can track methane concentrations from satellites so there really isn’t significant unknown sources. https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Copernicus/Sentinel-5P/Mapping_methane_emissions_on_a_global_scale https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Coperni...
  - iamthemonster 3y ago
    Methane emissions from oil and gas are enormously variable depending on what kind of upstream production facilities you have. Norway's methane emissions from oil and gas are negligible, and a couple of orders of magnitude better than the worst offenders, which are Russia and the US. Why the US? Shale gas is based on an enormous number of gas wells with a short lifetime each. It's not economical to provide power and compressed air at each of these shale gas wells, so they use the pressure of the natural gas as the energy source to actuate their valves and pump liquids. That means the gas is vented to the atmosphere. And any liquids storage is in tanks which have no blanketing, so any evaporation and associated gas goes straight to the atmosphere. US shale gas has incredibly high methane intensity. Not quite as bad as Russia, but worse than the rest of the world, including Saudia Arabia. LNG plants themselves tend to have fairly low methane emissions. If you go to Qatar or Australia, the other two leading LNG exporters, their CO2 emissions will be high, but due to their upstream facilities they will have a tiny fraction of the methane emissions of US production. But it's cheaper and easier to just engage in finger-wagging, pledges and vague ESG-inspired aspirations that to pay more for less-GHG-intensive LNG, so nothing will change in the short term.

bjoli 4y ago

And you don't think the FAO reports that are most often quoted (Livestock's long shadow, and Tackling climate change through livestock) didn't take the biogenic carbon cycle into account? Come on.

dataflow 3y ago

> Methane naturally turns into CO2 in the atmosphere After how long? A half-life of a decade, as I understand it? Not exactly the order of magnitude of luxury time we have to spare. > Even if it did increase warming more than CO2 "Even if it did" is strange wording for an established fact. Do you write "even if the sky was blue"? > once methane emissions reach a steady level, reducing methane emissions won't change a thing It's kind of really, really important how high that "steady level" is and how fast we'd reach it though, no? We're not just worried about life 1,000 years from now. We're worried about life 20 years from now. > The narrative is extremely misleading. I find this statement strange after reading your comment.

himinlomax 3y ago
> After how long? A half-life of a decade, as I understand it? Not exactly the order of magnitude of luxury time we have to spare Doesn't matter, if we keep the number of heads of cattle constant, the methane from them in the atmosphere will be constant. If we keep using the same number of ICE cars otoh, the CO2 from them in the atmosphere will keep increasing. We would have to drop the number of ICE cars to 0 to stop the increase.
- cesnja 3y ago
  If the amount of methane in the atmosphere is constant, the CO2 from that in the atmosphere will keep increasing.
  - ant6n 3y ago
    Well unless there‘s a closed loop co2 - soy - animal - co2/methane - co2. Meat production will involve fossil fuels tho.
  - codethief 3y ago
    As the sibling already said: We're in a closed loop. Methane decomposes into CO2, so if you want to maintain a constant level of methane in the atmosphere, energy/mass conservation dictates that this carbon needs to come from somewhere else. Solution: It actually comes from the CO2, via grass growth & the cattle's digestive system. The amount of CO2, averaged over time, therefore cannot increase.

ramblenode 3y ago

You make a good point about animal-based carbon emissions being a closed loop, but I don't think your conclusion that this loop doesn't accelerate the greenhouse effect is correct. Methane degrades to C02 in 1-1 proportion. So at any time, if more atmospheric carbon is concentrated as methane than as C02 then the greenhouse effect will be stronger at that time (because methane is a stronger GHG). If agriculture removes 1 unit of C02 from the atmosphere (from feedstock) and emits 1 unit of methane (from cow) then total atmospheric carbon is unchanged but the proportion of methane, and therefore the total GHG effect, is increased at that time. Summing over time, and you get an increase in overall heat that has been trapped.

ftrobro 3y ago
> I don't think your conclusion that this loop doesn't accelerate the greenhouse effect is correct It's not like mammalian herbivores are a recent invention. If a constant amount of mammalian herbivores in the world would cause a constant acceleration of greenhouse effect then the greenhouse effect would have increased exponentially for millions of years already. That has not been the case. If you increase the number of mammalian herbivores in the world then the greenhouse effect will increase for about a decade because of increasing levels of methane. After a decade, the methane level (and therefore the greenhouse effect) will have found a new (higher) equilibrium and no longer increase.
- phtrivier 3y ago
  It's not new, but the number has hardly stayed constant, since at some point humanity started mass herding. And, also, we kinda quadrupled the cheptel size in 50 years ? https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production#global-meat-production https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production#global-meat-produ... (To be fair, I was expecting more, and I was again astonished by the relative numbers of cattle vs poultry)
  - whythre 3y ago
    We have increased farming, but the American plains were there once home to vast herds of bison. Basically there’s been 30 million large ungulates there for a very long time.