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Comment by headmelted | Hacker News Reader

Worth noting that methane is up to 84 times as damaging as CO2 in the atmosphere upon release. (https://www.edf.org/climate/methane-other-important-greenhou...)

That means that (ironically I guess) this has the potential to be just about the biggest bang-for-buck weapon we have against climate change in the next decade.

I don't envy the researchers having to explain it to their kids later though.

"What'd you do in the great climate war mom?"

"I made cow farts less stinky."

"But seriously what did you do?"

groan

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It's true that methane has a much greater impact, but only in the short term. Long term, CO2 is much more dangerous. The methane that cow produces is recycled as it circulates through the atmosphere -> plants -> cows -> atmosphere cycle. Fossil fuel burning on the other hand is not. It's released from the ground and there's no way for it to get back there. Nothing is ever black and white and to think that eliminating the animals as the food source would solve the problem is naive.

https://onezero.medium.com/cow-farts-are-not-the-problem-f57...

https://youtu.be/vpTHi7O66pI

https://medium.com/@caroline.stocks/debunking-the-methane-my...

CO2 from fossil fuels can also be reabsorbed by plants. If you grow a forest, chop it down, bury the logs, then it's underground again. Although, not sure why you need it to be underground as long as it's not in the air.

If it's just sitting above the ground then bacteria will eat it and release the carbon as emissions. OR it burns and then turns into emissions.

It's short term (12 years seems like before being reabsorbed) but this also means that we have this big static-ish chunk being renewed and absorbed in a cycle. If we reduce emissions then that static variable goes down and gives us more time on the other 100 things we need to figure out.

Not sure if you were just joking, but methane itself is odorless, which is why odorants are added to make natural gas easily detectable.

I was just joking, but you've ruined it now with your facts.

Happy?

( this is also a joke so don't worry :-) )

Potentially that means the cow farts would become stinkier, which is an even funnier conversation. Joke still works!

It's not upon release. It's upon 2 decades of release.

Upon release that number is much higher, in the 100s of times, and after two decades it's close to zero.

Anyway, no, don't expect a large impact from this alone. Most of the methane emissions happen on the fossil fuel extraction and processing, not on agriculture. But it's something, and as a bonus it improves every other kind of efficiency too.

Cow burps produce more methane than farts.

Not sure whether it changes your argument though.

As I understand, the seaweed reduces methane both from burps and farts. Classy sentence to write, for sure.

"this has the potential to be just about the biggest bang-for-buck weapon we have against climate change in the next decade."

Now we only need to get cars 'n' lorries etc, ships and aeroplanes to eat the stuff and it's job done. Obviously, coal and gas fired power stations are already changing their diet and farting and belching less methane already.

The Great Barrier Reef is already de-bleaching and the Greenland icesheet has stopped melting.

> The Great Barrier Reef is already de-bleaching

How I wish this was the true picture, but unfortunately science paints a picture that is much worse:

Apr 7, 2020

'The scale of bleaching is enormous during global bleaching events,' according to Professor Hughes, 'the situation brings me to despair.'

The first recorded mass bleaching along the Reef struck in 1998, at the time the hottest year on record. Then again in 2002, 2016 and 2017, as more temperature records were broken.

The latest follows February’s unusually hot summer–resulting in the highest ever sea surface temperatures recorded on the Reef since controls began in 1900.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/tamarathiessen/2020/04/07/great...

So your problem with what I said is that there’s clearly far more to it than cow farts so you feel like we therefore shouldn’t do anything at all.

Or maybe I said “best bang-for-buck” and you heard “planes eat seaweed”.

The Greenland icesheet has not stopped melting. It's currently losing around 200 billion tons a year:

https://files.springernature.com/getResource/Shepherd%204158...

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