Unexpected Surge in Global Methane Levels
climatenexus.org
climatenexus.org
> Overall, we conclude that methane emissions associated with both the animal husbandry and fossil fuel industries have larger greenhouse gas impacts than indicated by existing inventories. [1]
[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/11/20/1314392110.abs...
I’m increasingly convinced that carbon sequestration on industrial scales is the only serious way to solve this problem.
If quitting meat sounds tough, consider that I’ve heard the only effective thing to do would be immediately cease all ICE production/use. But oddly feeding cows seaweed would cut their methane production something like 90%.
It’s good to keep all options on the table but seaweed is far from the silver bullet some people want it to be.
This is akin to trying to prevent the dust bowl[0] with giant vacuum cleaners. The environment is a system. We are a function of it, not the masters of it. We need to address the feedback loops causing this crisis that we are creating.
Even if that would work - As others have pointed out, we don't have the luxury of time to deploy industrial scale carbon sequestration. And even if we did - this type of thinking still discounts nature's value. [1] Why do we think it is easier to develop and deploy industrial scale carbon sequestration equipment when we have plants that are pretty damned good at doing just that? [2]
We need a total perspective change here. Nature doesn't need saving, the concrete deserts that are cities need green roofs and trees. We need to stop useless commutes and start working from home where applicable. We need to realize that lawns are an ecological disaster. [3]
But above all else, We need to make environmental damage illegal and stop allowing companies to profit off of it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl
[1]https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/10/this-is-why-putting-a...
[2]https://www.thoughtco.com/which-trees-offset-global-warming-...
[3]https://earther.gizmodo.com/lawns-are-an-ecological-disaster...
Yes, we do. It's just that it costs money, and nobody wants to pay up. Same goes for all other realistic climate solutions that we have, unfortunately.
https://www.reddit.com/user/thisisbillgates/comments/auosel/...
I did an estimation once for Western Europe using FAO stats[1] and by switching to a vegan diet we could roughly double the size of the forests, that's a massive scale! It'll help fighting the climate crisis and it'll also help solving the species extinction crisis in Western Europe. And the cool thing is that we don't need to wait for all the human population to switch overnight to a vegan diet, reducing meat and dairy consumption is a perfectly valid first step that everyone can do! The more people switch diets and the more space will become available for rewilding.
We can already see plant based diets becoming more and more popular, and at the same time it seems that flexitarian diets are also getting quite mainstream. I think there's hope on that front at least.
[1] https://vinc.cc/essays/changing-our-diet-for-a-wilder-world/
People can be vegan just fine, it's only a matter of habits.
Nutritional balance isn’t as well understood as many people think.
I’m all for reducing the scale of meat, but for someone like me—who’s been urged to eat more red meat as a result of my deficiencies on top of supplementation—ceasing to do so will put my health back at risk.
I don’t need to eat it every day, but it’s a near essential part of my diet.
Problems of nutrient uptake are the reason medical researchers and professionals aren’t just telling us to go ahead, subside on non-nutrient cellulose fibre cakes and just pop a pill containing all essential nutrients and calories every day.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/dietary-suppl...
Hard problems always feel this way. <insert slavery reference>
1. No way to stop eating animals 2. No way to stop driving/flying 3. Don't ask me to change. YOU change.
=> no change in status quo
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612452/how-seaweed-could-...
Which also explains why the flatulence of 60-100m buffalo before the industrial era didn’t warm the planet.
I imagine some locales might be worse for that problem than others, yeah?
Do you have any info you can share?
So it (at a high level, barely read place) sounds like standard fertilizer proves to have negative effects at scale when used where there might be the need for methane breakdown.
Do I have that about right? I’ll have to read that at length later, but it seems so simple that I feel I have it wrong. Because otherwise it seems like an easy fix—even if it means production has to decrease and price has to go up for cattle meats.
But it is no substitute for voting.
[0] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612452/how-seaweed-could-...
I'm Argentinean, if I stopped eating meat my passport would probably be revoked. I grew up thinking that it was perfectly normal to eat meat 7 days a week. Even with this background, I started reducing the amount of meat some time back. I'm not vegetarian by any means, but I reduced my meat consumption about 80% without even trying. I'm sure there are lots of people that could too.
> Less humans due birth control or fortuitous events (e.g. a plague)
Like everything, consumption follows a Pareto distribution, where some "whales" drive most of the demand. You can focus on them instead of hoping for lots of people dying.
Also, reduce poverty and the amount of newborns in this planet will naturally decrease precipitously, without any need for a mandate from anyone.
Having kids robbed me of the selfishness I required to isolate myself from the externalities of my lifestyle. To be honest, some days I wish I still didn't worry about it.
Why would that be immoral if you have negligible negative impact? It would only be a problem if everybody else will begin doing it. Which does not happen. Having children, hunting in the woods, owning a big house. Eating meat. Not being a universal example for every person is not immoral. People have different needs, and one person has more impact on the environment than other (but usually still negligible). If you want to limit yourself in this particular way, fine, but this isn't particularly moral thing to do. It is more of a feel-good thing to do.
I suppose my desire is partially to exit a commercial food system that I know is unsustainable. That system doesn't look like it will become sustainable any time soon, and I don't want to vote for it with my dollars and contribute to the issue with each meal.
I also don't necessarily do it to feel good. It feels bad at times, otherwise neutral. It feels like doing too little. There's no warm fuzzy feeling from half measures like this. I wish I could do more, but I struggle to figure out how.
There are a million articles on the internet arguing either way. I would start with this one for an interesting angle: https://theconversation.com/from-pests-to-profits-making-kan...
https://www.smh.com.au/national/kangaroos-run-wild-in-france...
Kidding. Well kinda... https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2606956/Now-...
b < (a + b)
How will it be done exactly? How long will it take? Will they be released to nature? Killed? Not allowed to reproduce and we'll wait for them to die of old age? Be supplied condoms?:-)
I don't have the knowledge to know whats needed to be done, or which steps are needed to be taken to do that, even if we stop consuming livestock products.
That's longer than the normal farm lifespan of almost all food animals. Most ones reared for meat have less than two years.
Reproduction of farm animals is totally controlled today by segregation usually from birth.
[1] https://whatsyourimpact.org/greenhouse-gases/methane-emissio...
It's because of this, and practical reality, that I don't understand why scrubbing is not considered a bigger part of the discussion on these topics. For instance one new technological solution [1] proposes an atmospheric removal of CO2 that could cost as little as $94 per ton. Our current CO2 emissions due to fossil fuels are about 37 billion tons a year. That's $3.5 trillion, 4% of the global GDP, to remove 100% of annual emission output. And an even better aspect of these solutions is that they also scale indefinitely. For instance you could not only reduce our footprint to 0 but even reduced the concentration of various gases in the sky, such as CO2, if that was deemed desirable. The same technology (or an inverse) also has direct application to future geoengineering efforts on other planets.
Ultimately this is technology that there does not seem to be any physical barrier against - in other words we can develop it. And now seems like a great time to develop it. The current mitigation ideas of cutting back on x seem to be all we consider, yet they have immense barriers to execution. By contrast technological solutions would be something that would require no sacrifice and simultaneously also greatly expand our technology and developmental capabilities. And most importantly they all seem tantalizingly close.
Yet in spite of all of this there seems to be near 0 discussion of these options. This is something I find confusing.
[1] - http://www.digitaljournal.com/tech-and-science/technology/ne...
See my other comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20013495
The second is that everything is relative to other options. The first major paper (to my knowledge) regarding imminent danger from climate change was published some 40 years ago. The first 'alarming' governmental report and subsequent media involvement was 30 years ago. Since then there's been effectively 0 change by reliance on social systems, treaties, agreements, and so on. Nearly all of the progress we have made is because natural gas became cheaper than coal, which would have happened with or without these agreements. I don't see this inability to effect social change in any way changing in the future. So by claiming there's not enough time to enact scrubbing (which by the earlier point is not necessarily a reasonable argument to begin with) you're suggesting that other viable alternatives can be enacted more rapidly - and I also see no reason to believe this to be accurate.
The UN clearly says there is a point of no return, could you please clarify what you are trying to say? https://www.un.org/press/en/2018/gaef3500.doc.htm
edit: better report https://www.egu.eu/news/428/deadline-for-climate-action-act-...
And what do you think about this type of scrubbing? https://www.ozy.com/fast-forward/the-search-for-a-perfect-pl...
In other words imagine 2000 calories is what you need to sustain your weight at your current activity levels. And you increase the caloric intake just 5%. Even though you've added almost nothing to what you regularly consume, you're going to go from zero weight gain to some very non-zero amount of gain. You eat thousands of calories and then adding a hundred more suddenly makes you go from a-okay to weight gain? It's a logical but counter-intuitive problem. The exact same thing is happening with worldwide CO2 levels and the increase in atmospheric greenhouse gases.
But now enter feedback mechanisms. As the Earth heats up natural processes begin to release more and more CO2. For instance through the melting of permafrost or otherwise frozen gases (the likely culprit here). You reach a point that the Earth is producing enough additional CO2 that even if you instantly cut human emissions to 0 it would be unlikely to have any meaningful effect. So when the UN speaks of things such as irreversible change, they are speaking exclusively of solving the problem by reducing our emissions.
Scrubbing does not have this problem. Instead of trying to change our role in the equilibrium (for instance trying to decrease those 100 calories) it works on the system as a whole. And you can scrub arbitrarily large amounts. You could even make places like Venus habitable again with scrubbing technology - though to emphasize - Venus is many many many orders of magnitude away from anything we would need to solve on Earth. There are also other grand motivations for developing it. For instance, atmospheric scrubbing, once well developed, could even begin to work as contingencies against life destroying natural or unnatural disasters - nuclear fallout, mega-volcano eruption, meteorite impact, etc. And the opposite (atmospheric injection) could help resolve natural disasters like gamma ray blasts which are one plausible explanation for the Ordovician mass extinction event. We're still just as vulnerable to many of these dangers today. So these are all very important technologies, but don't have a private economic incentive, so it's one area I think would be wise to consider increasing funding for. And again, there's no better time than now.
The most fundamental is that they are inherently temporary storage. Plants absorb various gases as they live, and then emit it as they die. So you're just kicking the can, and not even especially far. For instance a tree can absorb up to around 50 pounds of CO2 per year. To put that into contrast an iPhone 7 results in about 123 pounds of emissions, so you need 2.5 trees per iPhone per year. Alternatively a gallon of gasoline releases about 19 pounds of CO2. So for every 10 gallons of gas a person uses you'd need about 4 full grown trees. And again that is per year, per person. Look around your house and imagine how many trees you'd need just to temporarily mask just your own personal consumption. It'd be a small forest, per person.
That leads to the second problem - scale is limited. With an unbelievably massive planting effort we could probably work to temporarily mask our emissions today. And while our emissions today are a problem, you can't ignore the future. Right now the vast majority of the world doesn't emit much per capita, but that's because most of the world lives in less developed areas. As China, India, Africa, and other areas continue to develop their emissions per capita are going to continue to increase. We should expect worldwide emissions to sharply increase over the coming decades, and so we need solutions that can scale accordingly.
And the final issue is that these solutions can, at times, go up in flames. For instance a recent study on wildfires has indicated that wildfires in places such as California can end up contributing even more to their CO2 output than the vehicles in those areas. [1] Mass planting of greenery would work as temporary storage, but it's not an especially stable form and so the net effect would be very difficult to accurately predict.
[1] - https://www.livescience.com/1981-wildfires-release-cars.html
But, if I’m looking for errors, it seems more likely to me that we’d mis-estimate methane leaking out of the ground during fracking or from landfills than methane coming out of cows or manure storage facilities. I mean, you can measure a cow. You can put it in a room and measure the methane. But how do you measure the ground? It seems like the kind of thing you can mess up.
> The 2006 report Livestock's Long Shadow, released by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, states that "the livestock sector is a major stressor on many ecosystems and on the planet as a whole. Globally it is one of the largest sources of greenhouse gases (GHG) and one of the leading causal factors in the loss of biodiversity, while in developed and emerging countries it is perhaps the leading source of water pollution."
> A 2017 study published in the journal Carbon Balance and Management found animal agriculture's global methane emissions are 11% higher than previous estimates based on data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
> In November 2017, 15,364 world scientists signed a Warning to Humanity calling for, among other things, drastically diminishing our per capita consumption of meat. A similar shift to meat-free diets appears also as the only safe option to feed a growing population without further deforestation, and for different yields scenarios.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_p...
They feed on our fears...
https://www.fooddive.com/news/impossible-burger-boasts-much-...
Remember, 100 companies are responsible for 71% of climate emissions. These need to be dealt with, swiftly.
https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10...
I’m fed up reading comments along the lines of ‘we shouldn’t try to solve this problem, because we should be solving this other problem instead’. In every case I’ve seen this argument, there’s absolutely no constraint at all preventing us from doing both.
There is simply not enough land to replace all meat supply with grass-fed cattle meat. So if we all want to eat meat from grass-fed cattle only, that would mean exactly radical reduction in meat consumption.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/10/1...
Eating lots of soy is not healthy.
It’s a very weird and unconvincing argument on your part, to suggest humans should just start eating crops fed to cattle and that would somehow work in terms of sufficiently healthy and available nutrition as well as being net positive on climate change.
Cattle eats grass which grows everywhere in the world and cattle produces vastly healthier and nutritious profile of fat, protein, vitamins and other essential nutrients than what you could achieve by growing human edible crops for similar price. Sure you can achieve good nutrition with other expensive vegetables but that’s not what will happen if humans stop eating cattle. Let’s be realistic.
Suggest you read
Steinfeld, Henning; Gerber, Pierre; Wassenaar, Tom; Castel, Vincent; Rosales, Mauricio; de Haan, Cees (2006), Livestock's Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options
Or alternatively anything about food culture and supply in India.
I don't believe your current position is substantiated by any evidence; but I'm happy to look through any relevant numbers if you can find them.
"The comparison measures direct emissions from transport against both direct and indirect emissions from livestock."
> The water used by the livestock sector is over 8 percent of global human water use. The major part of this water is in fact used for irrigation of feed crops, rep- resenting 7 percent of the global water use.
And, yeah, that’s kind of my point - let’s limit cattle to grass and push it’s production somewhere out to steppes of mongolia or something, which will help recover Amazon rainforests and free-up land for more nutritious vegetables for humans.
Cattle can eat grass, but most of them in North America eat very little grass. They eat a lot of grain that is intensively farmed. That feed farming has a significant impact on the environment through regular agriculture practices. By growing food for humans instead, the impact would be reduced simply because not as much crop is needed.
Red meat does have a good nutrition profile, but a balanced vegetable focused diet does too. People underestimate how much protein and fat can be had from plants. I'm not sure why you think people won't do this if they stop eating red meat. Why isn't that realistic?
I speak as someone who absolutely loves meat and thought much like you do recently. Life without, or with much less meat is fine. I've come to realize I largely eat it out of convenience and comfort.
You obviously missed my explicit position against corn-fed cattle and went on to attack some straw man. Please re-think and re-state your argument such that I don’t get an urge to dismiss it based on irrelevancy from the very first statement?
In fact in your following two paragraphs you just repeated the same things I already said just using different words.
We don’t disagree on much.
https://timeforchange.org/are-cows-cause-of-global-warming-m...
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/soy/
> Results of recent population studies suggest that soy has either a beneficial or neutral effect on various health conditions. Soy is a nutrient-dense source of protein that can safely be consumed several times a week, and is likely to provide health benefits—especially when eaten as an alternative to red and processed meat.
By the way, the reason @jaxr is talking about eating lots of soy is not because we'd need to be heavily reliant on soy for protein if we gave up meat - there are lots of other protein sources, of course. They mentioned eating lots of soy because we currently feed something like 70+% of soy to livestock, so there'd be a lot of it "laying around" if livestock suddenly didn't exist. Of course, it wouldn't actually play out like that.
The thing about research is that if you look for studies to support a particular conclusion, you can always find them, usually more than one. You could probably find a study or two to support eating nothing but beef and pork, if you tried hard enough. But if you want the truth, you have to read ALL the related studies, and you have to critique and interpret them and understand their scope/limitations and relate them all together to build up as complete a picture as you can. Dr. Greger isn't perfect, but he and his team seem to be doing a hell of a job trying to find the truth.
He advocates a whole-food plant-based diet because overall, that's what the evidence seems to say is healthiest. But he's not a hard-line vegan or anything, just trying to ensure that people have can make informed choices by giving us all the information. Not just in terms of broad strokes like "eat more vegetables, don't eat so much meat", but all sorts of weird and interesting details like which sorts of lentils are healthiest, or why broccoli sprouts are amazing at fighting cancer.
And it's not an alarmist site -- here's a nuanced take on glyphsate, used on GMO soy https://nutritionfacts.org/video/gmo-soy-and-breast-cancer/
Back to the topic at hand, here's an example about Soy and prostate cancer. https://nutritionfacts.org/video/the-role-of-soy-foods-in-pr...
And to find a way out of the forest of conflicting info -- if you find a study and want to get a second opinion on it, search for it on nutrition facts (you probably have to use google, with a query like "site:nutritionfacts.org <study keywords>").
I'm not encouraging you to blindly believe what Dr. Greger says! You should evaluate it for yourself. But I strongly believe that after watching a few videos on random topics, you'll start to see how most people have no idea what they're talking about when it comes to nutrition science, and intentionally or unintentionally spread falsehoods.
Cows milk is optimized for cows.
For example, flying is so cheap I would say people "over do it" just because they can. I often think it would be great if there was more cost associated with air fair to factor in the environmental damage each flight causes.
Yeah people will be inconvenienced slightly but what is the alternative? Holiday in locations closer to home? Go by rail? Video conferencing ? They all seem like good options compared to the alternative.
It doesn't. I reduced my own meat consumption and I don't think it was enough. In fact, no single measure would be enough. There are no low hanging fruits here. We need lots and lots of different adjustments across the board.
So, this is a good advice, along with all the other good pieces of advice.
Most of these 100 companies are oil companies, and the emissions from oil they sold on to consumers is unfairly attributed to them. Exxon don't burn oil for fun, they sell it to people to power their cars.
This statistic is incredibly misleading.
The artificially low price of oil due to postponing / offloading these external costs significantly slows free market innovation of alternatives and efficiencies.
So... what's the best way to pay for these negative externals so we don't simply pass the buck to our kids?
We don't have to throw executives in jail for addressing the market, we just need a more comprehensive (and truer) price (via taxes) applied to oil.
Start sequestering carbon or create funds to research effective ways to sequester carbon. For the US, it’d be as simple as giving the DOE R&D funds and a mandate.
Is it? When I pour motor oil in my motorcycle, drain it 500 miles later, and have it recycled does it put CO2 in the atmosphere? Nope, at least not beyond the refining process.
Burning oil is what puts CO2 in the atmosphere, and it's consumers that do that. Not oil companies. Sure, one could say that oil companies are the ones providing the fuel that consumers are using, but that's sort of like an obese person complaining about food companies making him fat.
We could charge more for fossil fuels, but this effectively functions as a regressive tax. It's a tax based on how long people need to commute through and need more energy to deliver goods over greater distances. This disproportionately impacts less developed areas, which are typically less wealthy.
In terms of gasoline, the technology builds on itself. Infrastructure like roads and fast food, expectations like the ability to commute, etc. If cars and gasoline were prohibitively expensive, commuting would pretty quickly become obsolete. Companies that require workers to drive 2 hours a day would have a hard time hiring people... or we'd find new ways to sustain it (alternatives and / or efficiencies). The price of all goods would go up considerably too (shipping, manufacturing). We rely on it so heavily!
Obviously we can't eliminate dependence overnight, which is why being proactive (arguably not proactive enough anymore though) and gradually implementing programs to phase it out or change it are required.
The goal should be to manage the pain / cost so we don't get hammered by a massive change in the future, or maybe taking too long and getting stuck with an unmanageable situation like massively accelerating climate change. The pain WILL happen regardless, and probably already is.
Just running with it, like we're mostly doing right now, is likely to disproportionally affect less developed areas far more than the price of gas and goods (floods, fires, and apocalypse type stuff).
If you believe climate change is real and negative (I assume you do) this is one part of a potential solution. If you don't believe climate change is real and negative though, then we're just not on the same page yet, and it's too early to have this discussion.
Changing our own diet is on the table too... considering we don't need to eat cattle to survive. This problem is one of overconsumption, and isn't going away by keeping our lifestyle the same.
Well managed cattle herds can sequester carbon in the top soil. There is absolutely no need to go vegetarian to save the planet.
And policy needs to be global in scope. Because even if advanced economies were to reduce their emissions to zero, this would be insufficient to prevent warming with substantial risks. Note that emerging economies are producing an increasingly large share of total global emissions, while the share from advanced economies is dwindling, now accounting for only 35% of global emissions. This trend continued past 2015 and is forecast to continue in the coming years.
By 2040, emerging economies will produce 75% of all emissions, while only 25% will come from advanced economies.
But policy-makers are still stuck in a mid-2000s mindset. Back then, their emissions were still the highest in the world and they had to focus their policies on reducing their own emissions. This no longer makes sense.
Advanced economies have a special obligation to do more to lower emissions in all countries. Why is it our responsibility? Because our per capita emissions are still the highest and we have emitted the most carbon since the industrial revolution.
Only if the policies of advanced economies lead to reduced emissions in all countries, can we prevent dangerous climate change. The most effective policies to prevent climate change are those that stimulate clean energy innovation. In other words, those that stimulate progress or breakthroughs in clean energy technologies (or any low-carbon technology that lowers emissions as well as demonstration projects, i.e. RD&D). Providing the global public good of cheaper clean energy technology helps all countries reduce their emissions.
If you want to do something check out my crowdfunding campaign for effective climate policy here: https://www.lets-fund.org/clean-energy
For example Methane Sat[1] looks like it can cover a wide area and is coming on-line in the time frame to do some good (2020).
If you take one transatlantic flight, you'd produce more CO2 than by driving for a year.
At the same time, the majority of methane is produced by fossil fuel production that drives industry, transportation and energy production, that are also the largest sources of C02 emissions.
It seems to me that by addressing the emissions of industry, transporation and energy production, we'd be killing two birds with one stone- whereas by going vegan or vegetarian we would only achieve a small reduction in both kinds of emission.
The best thing to do to reduce emissions seems to stop driving, stop flying, prefer public transport, stop buying a new phone every year and stop burning as much excess electricity as we now do. Going vegan or vegetarian seems like a personal option, and a distant third or fourth priority for the general population.
There are many more, much more effective things to do than stop eating meat.
_______________
[1] Thus, there is wide agreement among experts that, regardless of the drivers behind the surge, reducing emissions from fossil-fuel production and distribution, primarily through ending leaks and venting, is one of the few options available to control global methane levels and that this option is the most practical one. In addition, scientists report that there are narrow opportunities to address agricultural emissions, e.g. changes in the diet of livestock can reduce the production of methane without affecting production.
"According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the largest sources of U.S. GHG emissions in 2016 were electricity production (28 percent of total emissions), transportation (28 percent) and industry (22 percent). All of agriculture accounted for a total of 9 percent. All of animal agriculture contributes less than half of this amount, representing 3.9 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. That’s very different from claiming livestock represents as much or more than transportation." [0]
Global direct greenhouse gas emissions from transportation versus livestock represent 14 versus 5 percent respectively. [1]
Also consider: "According to the FAO, as much as 70 percent of all agricultural land globally is range land that can only be utilized as grazing land for ruminant livestock." [1]
[0] https://theconversation.com/yes-eating-meat-affects-the-envi...
The FAO's latest number for livestock emissions is 14.5% when considering the full life-cycle. It doesn't matter that we don't have a full life-cycle analysis for transportation - that doesn't change the number for livestock. The author tries to dismiss the 14.5% because "[transportation might be a bigger culprit]" and talks about "unringing" the bell on the FAO report simply because of a correction from 18% to 14.5%, which seems a bit of an overstatement.
On top of this, new (2017) data seems to suggest that our predictions of livestock emissions were too low:
> Using the new emissions factors, we estimate global livestock emissions of 119.1 ± 18.2 Tg methane in 2011; this quantity is 11% greater than that obtained using the IPCC 2006 emissions factors, encompassing an 8.4% increase in enteric fermentation methane, a 36.7% increase in manure management methane, and notable variability among regions and sources.
The current thinking goes we should eat "less or no meat", when the effort could be put towards not using grain for livestock feed, and promoting other changes such as reducing methane specifically by adding seaweed to the livestock's diet. That's not to mention that grazing is essential to both prevent and reverse desertification.
For 20 years there have been articles/studies saying that the "calthrate gun" containing all the methane stored in Siberia and the arctic is the best reason we need to keep CO2 levels below 400 ppm.
Now CO2 is at 415 ppm and we're starting to see the accelerated release of methane and it's "unexpected." Why not interview one of the people who said this is exactly what was going to happen 10 years ago, and ask them what happens next?
Higher arctic temperatures = permafrost melts, releasing trapped methane. e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01313-4
https://climatenexus.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/ch4_tren...
There is no magical CO2 level of 400 that suddenly causes methane to be released from permafrost.
The 400 PPM is a target that is easy for humans to discuss. The general idea that increased atmospheric CO2 leads to accelerated methane releases due to thawing of arctic permafrost still holds true, and humans need to set CO2 targets to mitigate this issue.
The CO2 level should be far lower than 400... A level closer to 200ppm should be the target.
And in those regions in particular have 2 possitive feedback loops, with less snow the land absorb more heat, and then the "unexpected" release of methane.
Because methane is trapped in ice, and it's believed that the ice will melt, releasing more methane.
Even if you release all the methane stored in permafrost, that effect will be short lived on a geologic timescale.
"The 'why' behind this resurgence is hotly debated and not well understood. That said, most experts in the field suspect that all traditional sources (natural and anthropogenic) are contributing at least in small part to the surge, and that the biggest contributor might be wetlands responding to climate change (though there is some dissent on this point)."
But what do we have instead? Ignorance, unwillingness, a dangerous continuation of the status quo on the state level andin the general polulation. Think about exxon who knew this was a problem since the '70 and there's no change in sight. A dark (or should I say hot?) future awaits us.
1. Political leaders in many countries (eg. Australia) have been deeply corrupted by the fossil fuel industry. And they're mostly legally immune because they essentially allow that industry to write the laws (including those permitting them to take up fossil fuel company sinecures when they quit politics).
2. Even when you have less-corruptible or more courageous political leaders, they have to try to convince populations which have been subject to relentless corporate propaganda (eg. from Exxon-funded sources as you suggest) for 4 decades. Propaganda has its limits, but it does work.
I mean, what was the point of all the wars, death and destruction if the military just allow themselves to suffocate? That would seem like a strange end.
Future generations, if there are ones, will look back at this time and see that we have an oil burning culture. Everything we eat, where we live, fossil fuels have been used to produce and maintain it. If it only was cars that was the problem we would easily solve it.
To make a real change a Total War economy would have to be implemented, with the sole function of combating climate change. No-one wants to even start suggesting that because there would be so much inconvenience and angry people.
Since the effects are only a minor inconvenience yet, for people in the developed world, its much easier to do nothing. Some deny there is a problem, others acknowledge it, but put it on the back of their minds mostly (I'm in this category). The effect is the same. Politicians follow the path of least resistance, that is how they are elected.
I'm not sure it's so dire as that. Taking the US as an example (numbers from https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...), the largest source of greenhouse gases is transportation at 29%. A real push to switch to electric cars could have a significant impact without significantly changing the way people live their lives. If presented correctly, people could see it as a net benefit: no longer going out of your way to find a gas/petrol station, you just plug in at home and have a full "tank" every morning.
The next largest source is electricity production (27%). Again, a major push towards green energy would benefit from strong leadership, but it wouldn't impact our culture very much. It makes little difference whether the electricity comes from a coal power station or solar power combined with grid storage as long as my TV turns on.
The next chunk is industry (22%). Most of this is actually for power generation again, so see electricity generation above.
Only now do we get to residential and commercial uses at 12% (mostly heating). Only here are we starting to impact the little people in a big way, and I would argue that even then, changing out my furnace for a heat pump is not going to have a big impact on how I live my life.
For example,
>changing out my furnace for a heat pump is not going to have a big impact on how I live my life
A heat pump is a significant investment which would put the majority of American families into financial turmoil. There needs to be much larger government incentive for these units, for reducing this 12% of emissions to be viable.
Edit: all of these things are expensive and require strong leadership, but strong leadership is what the original comment was talking about.
Furthermore, switching out the 200+ million cars in USA to electric vehicles is not going to help emissions because of the carbon footprint of newly manufactured vehicles.
The idea that providing each citizen with a personal 1000 pound supply of lithium ion will save the climate is bananas.
I agree that swapping out coal for wind and solar could be done without much change to culture but solar panel production isn't carbon free either, what we really need to do is use way, way less electricity per person, and its almost impossible to convince people to sacrifice for their future.
As far as my suggestions: cash-for-clunkers program except with lifetime public transit passes instead of cash. Melt down the ICE vehicles for their aluminum and build lots of trains. This would be justice for the 1920s-40s when all of our electric trains were melted down to build tanks and bombs.
For the haters that say trains don't work in USA, I refer you to the 1913 Illinois Interurban railway map [1] where you could pay a nickel to hop on a 20-60mph trolley to the next town over.
Use those same train lines to move mail and food from the farmland it passes through.
Stop eating imported food, stop sending food roundtrip to China for processing before shipping it back to the store [2]
Stop building houses that need to be heated and cooled artificially year round because they have no notion of solar gain or heat mass.
I could go on...but business as usual will keep destroying the environment that keeps us alive.
[1] https://legacy.lib.utexas.edu/maps/historical/txu-oclc-64454...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/26/business/worldbusiness/26...
EVs are not a car someone is getting who wasn’t otherwise getting a car. It’s not a question of “let’s build 100 million EVs” but rather, since we are building 100 million vehicles, as many of them as possible should be EVs.
Keep in mind that in order to achieve meaningful results it’s going to cost a lot of money. That means asking people to pay more, perhaps significantly more, for items, or in taxes, to cover that cost.
Increasing costs is not just a theoretical hand wavey “oh the rich will pay” effect. It’s a “pushing more people below the poverty line” kind of effect.
The idea that we should be using way less electricity per person is also I think missing the point entirely. Electricity per person is a good proxy for productivity which is a good proxy for wealth of a nation. Reducing energy use is putting the whole country on a diet, and shrinking GDP would cause more pain and suffering than climate change in the short term. The solution doesn’t lie in that approach.
In fact we should be using significantly more electricity per person, to offset the reduced amount of fossil fuel consumption.
Electricity generation & supply needs to get highly renewable and a lot cheaper. That is already the trend and we will get there over the next 20 years. Once the retail cost for generation and supply is reliably below $0.05/kWh you have effectively priced out most uses of fossil fuels. If electricity stays expense then I just heat my house with natural gas and keep driving my ICE vehicle.
Your “rolling coal” example is prescient, although perhaps not for the reason you think. These are people who have been asked to make basically zero personal sacrafice at all (maybe they chipped in $1.00 toward the EV tax credits) who still feel threatened by EVs. Rolling coal is not a strike against EVs it’s the perfect example of how important it is to find efficient solutions that don’t undercut members of our society, and why EVs are such a great solution.
this really seems to be the root of the matter. unfortunately the wording isn't completely clear.
are you saying that we'd have to accept some economic discomfort in the short term to mitigate some serious long term issues? that seems like a tradeoff worth discussing.
or are you saying that the consequences of economic contraction are so dire that we'd better just learn to deal with the environmental consequences. maybe we can find some market solutions (i.e. shifting to electricity) that reduce emissions somewhat without harming whats really important.
It could have already started by respecting the Paris agreement.
In this regard, the US decision to go out of the agreement, to protect the american way of life etc, can be considered as belonging to the same category than crimes against humanity.
How can US people have tolerated this desision ? I mean, from my place, I didn't see a lot of protest.
Such a shame.
The incentives are just not there within the current system. When was the environment a major topic in an election anywhere? It's always pitted against "the economy" despite being part of the economy.
Add to that there's no immediate visible benefits. A political term is a few years. If the climate stays liveable for a few years, nobody is going to notice.
Plus most countries are small. It doesn't matter if France or the UK go totally green. What's needed is international influence so that everyone goes green. Who is going to run on a platform of "We'll go green, and I'll convince the rest of the world as well"?
It is much easier to frame climate change as a made up political issue than to actually try to do anything about it.
It boggles the mind that our one hope is an authoritarian state run by engineers.
The short term effect of these policies is to cause a significant amount of economic pain and discomfort on the people you enact them against.
A political leader who'd force their nation "go full green" would be ousted at the next election, if not quicker - immediate riots on the streets would be likely.
One of the triggers for gilets jaunes in France was a comparably tiny fuel eco-tax - can you imagine the effect of a taxation that's intented to meaningfully decrease consumption; an eco-tax so large not that people pay more and whine at increased prices but that many of them would actually be forced to stop eating beef and driving cars because they can't afford it? Most of the population currently doesn't want such restrictions and the political leaders won't force them to.
Besides the domestic unrest others mention, yeah, they do think about the effect it could have on neighbouring countries. The immediate effect would be tanking one's own economy and significantly reducing the country's position as compared to the neighbours who didn't implement such change. Countries compete with each other too, just like companies do, and they are hesitant to change much for the same reasons companies are.
> Potential drivers in the category of increased emissions include emissions from intensive agricultural practices, emissions from oil and gas operations, and increased emissions from wetlands responding to global warming. [This last potential driver is particularly worrisome as it implies the engagement of a global warming feedback loop.]
So maybe "wetlands" is a veiled reference to permafrost. Which in fact are basically frozen wetlands.
Never mind that cars, ships, agriculture ( I bet most of these vegans haven't ever heard of petrochemicals or fertilizers ), smartphones, electricity, etc are all individually greater contributors to environmental damage.
Also, the growing numbers of bison, deer and other ruminants around the world contributes to increase in methane levels. People forget that all ruminants ( bison, cows, etc ) all produce methane though they'll use the faux stat of them being net negative contributors.
And sad as it is, veganism will actually increase fossil fuel usage as the vegetation that people eat need petrochemical fertilizers to grow and a vegan diet cannot be locally sourced like meat can, so they need to ship vegan food from all over the world. But vegans don't like facts too much. They'll throw in the nonsense about livestock agriculture being transfered for humans. Good luck surviving on corn, soy and wheat. Humans aren't ruminants. We are omnivores by nature.
XKCD put up a well-sourced graphic depicting the relative amounts of mammal biomass on the Earth. Wild animals aren't anywhere remotely close to food animals.
I'm trying to wrap my head around this argument (and I'm not a vegan). If we're not vegan, we're eating animal protein, and those animals making that protein are...vegan. We're ultimately all getting our protein from plants.
New kind of clathrate gun we didn't anticipate?
This graph is more fun but not up to date https://www.methanelevels.org/
If it's been rising for centuries and is continuing to rise now, shouldn't the six year period of stability be the anomaly, not the fact that it's continuing to increase?
Until we substantially reel in the global population size the situation will continue to be rather precarious.
People that raise this point almost 100% exclusively mean that about "people that are not me"
If you're suggesting I want other people to have fewer kids while I raise a family myself, you're mistaken - zero kids here and none in my future.
They said that, until we do, the situation will remain precarious. I'm sure you can imagine an (admittedly extremely improbable) scenario where the global population shrinks to 4 billion over the course of 500 years without significant injustice being done to anyone to achieve the shrinkage.
Sadly, when it comes to greenhouse-gas-driven climate change, the timeline on which we will succeed or fail to address the problem is too short for any population size adjustments to be of any use (unless you want to achieve the adjustment by mass murder).
This is probably the source of any misunderstanding between you. The OP is not contemplating mass murder, but does not appreciate the urgency of the climate issue. You appreciate the urgency and so assume the OP must be advocating an "immediate" extermination.
People who don't think they need to breed to have a number of descendants survive childhood mortality to look after them in their old age don't have lots of kids.
Abort all children unless the condition is met, and if they are birthed in violation of that, take them away from the mother and imprison her.
[here "woman" is intended as "person with an uterus"]
Quality of life tends to increase, and correspondingly impact increases. We already have far too many people if you consider the quality of life is destined to normalize at the "western" end of the spectrum.
I’m not sure I agree that this is true because it ignores all of the efficiency gains (especially in electronics but in other things as well) we’ve seen the last 50+ years. Not to mention things like renewable solar which is not readily and cheaply available.
The energy input of solar (sourcing and extracting the rare earths, the manufacturing process, installing and maintaining them in situ) is non-zero, and solar panels have a finite lifespan. These variables are often not well understood, nor factored into discussions of solar as "renewable". I don't believe there exists an end-to-end solar operation, i.e. the entire supply chain solar powered by its own products. So solar is only cheap because its inputs are cheap, and they are cheap because they are powered by cheap oil.
http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/total-fertility-r...
What does this mean? Forced sterilization? One-child policies? I don't ask this to be confrontational, but because it's a difficult question and I honestly want to hear opinions. Access to contraception doesn't make a difference when the culture still says you have 8 kids. This is borne out by what has happened: continued growth of the third-world population. T
I suspect that the availability of contraception is being over estimated.
Even in Poland I had Catholic hardliner pharmacists refuse to sell me morning after pills, and in some cases, regular birth control pills.
In any case, availability of contraceptives just gives people choices, and what people choose depends on lots of things, economic and otherwise.
Also be careful what you wish for. Some of our most important social programs (such as social security) have intense insolvency issues as birth rates continue to decline.
Population already has a negative rate of change in the west (leaving out migration).
Yes, population is the core problem, and there's no avoiding that fact. There's no easy solution to it--increased education and wealth slowly reduce the birth rate, but that takes generations and is far from certain. Absolutely critical--and very easy--would be dropping immigration from countries with net-positive birth rates to zero. Good luck finding support for that among people concerned with climate change.
They appear to be venturing into new areas and releasing carbon there, furthering global warming.
There are just too many scenarios of that kind.
Either we really are doomed, and climate will switch into a new kind of equilibrium hostile to humans.
Or, there are lots of mechanisms in place that counteract against such effects, and which are not yet well understood.
With so many climate based doomsday scenarios, how did earth survive for so long? I think there have to be at least some regulating mechanisms.
See the other 5 mass extinction events.
Humans are actually very adaptable to all sorts of climates. They've lived in the arctic and in the Saharah.
Also, mass extinction events OK, but we are talking about a runaway effect of heating up the atmosphere, turning it into a Venus like planet. That doesn't seem to have happened before.
Lived? Yes. Thrived? Not so much.
Also not saying everything will become like the Saharah. Just that humans may adapt better than those animals who died in mass extinction events in the past.
Earth will be fine. Us, not so much.
But even if you wanted to be less strict, life on Earth will be fine too. It's humanity - and in particular the technological civilization - that's in danger.