Scientists raise alarm over ‘dangerously fast’ growth in atmospheric methane
nature.com
nature.com
https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends_ch4/
Link to methane, click on one of the four switched at the top for the others.
Warning: It always is pretty depressing to visit this site.
You can also check out a tab "Growth Rate", for CO2 for example it's https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/gr.html -- which is even more depressing. Even the rate(!) increases!
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So, I'm mid-life, and I do what many might say is actually interesting and useful software work, no standard stuff, lots of new things to design and plan and implement in a small software company I co-founded in a team that works well together. Currently we do most of our work for the health sector. Still, I can't take it too seriously. I look at that data and I think to myself, in a few decades we will have problems, many indirectly from more and more troubled nations who will bear the brunt of the climate change, that that silly little piece of software I write seems meaningless if I start thinking about the bigger picture. I'm not demotivated or depressed, it's more the opposite, I can't feel excited about any achievements because I think that most of what we do, what people do these days, is just keeping busy to avoid facing the bigger reality. The show must go on. I've developed the feeling that what we have, even in the rich countries, is much more fragile than people realize.
Unless there is a full stop of digging up any more carbon from below ground, in the form of oil, gas, and coal, and I mean full stop and not just a reduction, the amount of carbon in the above ground carbon cycle is going to keep increasing. No amount of trees planted or most of he other measures proposed will change that. How likely is that to happen?
And I am truly bewildered. When I look at all the graphs the only thing I see is that we have to stop everything now. But what I see at work is that we just keep digging with an even faster pace.
This summer I tried to read some old Greek tragedies. The characters have to make difficult choices and it all ends with tragedy despite everyone’s best intensions and efforts. I was saddened by the resemblance on how humanity is tackling climate change. I am afraid we are writing an old Greek tragedy.
https://workonclimate.org/ https://www.myclimatejourney.co/ https://climateaction.tech/
I volunteer on the first one and am a member on the other two, and there is a relatively good (and growing!) possibility of finding a good match between what you feel and what you end up working on.
There you can find incubators and funds to launch your climate startup or job postings to work on the coolest climate tech companies (and the not so cool ones too!)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08hpmmf
The kind of carbon ejection and correlated temperature change we're seeing today hasn't really been seen since the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. That atmospheric event happened over the course of 50_000 years, we're looking to replicate it in a matter of 100s of years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_Therm...
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/17/the-great-sibe...
> Over thousands of years, the frozen earth swallowed up all manner of organic material, from tree stumps to woolly mammoths. As the permafrost thaws, microbes in the soil awaken and begin to feast on the defrosting biomass. It’s a funky, organic process, akin to unplugging your freezer and leaving the door open, only to return a day later to see that the chicken breasts in the back have begun to rot. In the case of permafrost, this microbial digestion releases a constant belch of carbon dioxide and methane. Scientific models suggest that the permafrost contains one and a half trillion tons of carbon, twice as much as is currently held in Earth’s atmosphere.
> But since 2007, when methane levels began to rise more rapidly again, the proportion of methane containing 13C began to fall (see ‘The rise and fall of methane’). Some researchers believe that this suggests that much of the increase in the past 15 years might be due to bacterial sources, rather than the extraction of fossil fuels.
Honest question, not refuting anything here just a lot of the articles stop at the melting part, what happens after that?
I was actually trying to edit my comment to hone in the fact that the video is a good one despite being on TED. ;-)
Looking for serious answers.
So as long as it’s methane it’s hundreds of times worse than CO2, then it becomes the same as co2[0]. Never better.
Which is why despite a short half life it has a global warming potential of ~25 over 100 years (Co2 is 1).
Then you also have the issue that even if it’s short (relatively, it takes multiples of the half-life to really taper off) for that duration your GW effect really shoots up, which tends not to be a good thing, 120 years is already quite short for biological systems to adapt, 10 is basically infeasible.
[0] actually a bit worse still as 1t ch4 yields 2.7t co2 and gwp is mass-relative
More water -> less evaporation (but the partial pressure will remain the same more or less)
Here's a useful twitter thread from a real expert: https://twitter.com/hausfath/status/1425572803508465664
And if you're up for a pretty technical (but still fairly approachable) read, check out R.T. Pierrehumbert ''Short-Lived Climate Pollution.'' Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 2014 42:1, 341-379 [https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-earth-060313-054843]. Near the end of the paper, he delivers this gem: "Methane mitigation is like trying to stockpile bananas to eat during retirement. Given the short lifetime of bananas, it makes little sense to begin saving them until your retirement date is quite near."
Methane emission through permafrost (both land and submarine) could end up as a cascading natural emission that forms a feedback loop.
I think that's a big part of why people are panicking.
As a species we need another plan. I like a mixed approach of sequestering atmospheric gasses via processes that synthesize useful compounds from the components we don't want in the air as well as hard scifi concepts like giant reflective surfaces in space. Throttling the quantity of sunlight by reflecting a portion away from the earth sounds super expensive... but that might be the only viable option left.
The problem is, I despair of us doing EITHER, and "quite a few years of fucked-up weather" is going to sound like a fantasy story.
Despite that CO2 emissions in 2020 dropped by 6%. A change which would be wiped out in a few years by the natural growth.
Getting individuals to do anything meaningful about climate change is like those people telling millennials to stop buying Starbucks and cancel Netflix in order to buy a home.
That’s the elephant in the room.
Lockdowns are absolutely horrible. I don’t get why you don’t kill us directly, and pretend to do it for our health. Suicide, harm, family violence, just having a life with no leisure, no secret why solitary confinement is used as a means of torture in US prisons.
You just don’t have the stats yet, but the harm you have caused by choosing lockdowns is incommensurable. PLEASE build stats on well-being and how many hours-in-good-health were actually saved by lockdowns, and wait a few years for those studies to surface before concluding that lockdowns are a fine way to deal with a problem. Taking harm upon others may satisfy your feeling of dealing a problem, but the base problem, Covid, has not even been squashed, it spread in waves and became widespread and endemic anyway like doctors always said it would. Not - solved, but saddistic measures were taken against the weaker of us.
With global warming, I have no doubt you’ll crush our lives again without solving anything about global warming itself.
First is that we are on track to overshoot the goal of limiting warming to 1.5C. It's now more a question of how much we are going to blow past 1.5C. Every bit counts now and a pulse of very potent greenhouse gasses at this time is very unhelpful.
2. There could be tipping points that aren't predictable. Methane may temporarily add a small increase to the global average temps, but could end up being the difference for whether permafrost melt begins releasing large amounts of co2 and even more methane that take us up to some even higher temperatire equilibrium.
Global warming is a massive unplanned, uncontrolled experiment with the thermal and chemical properties of the only biosphere we know of. The sooner we stop that experiment the safer humanity will be overall.
Large, influential emitters like China and India will not play ball. As such, the climate experiment will inevitably continue unabated, despite any of the self-damaging choices made by the developed world.
Additionally, our ability to actually combat the acute impacts of climate change (i.e. construction of flood barriers, land reclamation, movement of people out of flood-prone areas) could easily be actively hampered by overzealous limits on human development associated with attempt to reduce emissions. In other words, this is a nuanced issue and we have little choice but to press onwards.
That is a lame excuse, mostly used by people from developed countries that are responsible for the issue, so you dodge responsibility and also try to put blame on the developing country why you are continuing screwing the environment. It is like you have a history of you and your ancestors abusing your children and you don't want to stop because the new neighbor is also abusing his children too (I am thinking especially at coal plants and cars that have effects locally too, so cleaning yup your house means you will have healthier population and less CO2)
This is a poor metaphor. It's more akin to having a family history of child abuse, trying to stop the cycle, explaining to your neighbor why it's bad, and then your neighbor saying "well, your grandpa beat the shit out of your dad, so we get to beat our kids too!"
And of course, the largest producer of CO2 isn't the US as you imply, it's China.
Additionally the idea that deploying new technologies equates to economic self harm is absurd. The price per kilowatt hour of renewable energy has been dropping continuously for decades in a pattern similar to moores law. Soon renewable energy will be so much cheaper than fossil fuels that it will be similar to what the discovery of crude oil deposits did to the whale oil industry. Betting on fossil fuels from an economic perspective is stupid as hell in 2022 and risking the survival of worldwide ecosystems and society on that bet is literally the stupidest thing I can think of people advocating for.
China is a problem. We absolutely need China to reduce their emissions much more aggressively than they are. Instead of using them as an excuse to sleepwalk humanity towards potential catastrophe we should be reducing our own emissions so as to have a legitimate position from which to argue about what China should be doing while using our significant economic leverage to incentivize China to reduce their emissions.
It's not like china is sitting there burning coal for no reason. And all those ships are going to ports in the US and the like.
Of course this is all a shared responsibility, but let's not act like all of those "CO2 emissions by country" calculations are not extremely fudged by how consumption, manufacturing, and recycling happen in various parts of the world.
Or we can just agree that this metaphor doesn't work.
Only if you ignore per capita and history.
A better analogy, Someone was selling meat, 50% horse and 5-% rabbit , he was using q horse at 1 rabbit ratio, this are your stats , bullshit.
>It's more akin to having a family history of child abuse, trying to stop the cycle
Except you are trying not to stop the cyucle and finding s shitty excuse, I will continue poisoning this city with coal related toxic waste because China has even worse pollution. I should continue throwing plastic garbage in the river and kill our river life because the neighboring country/cities does the same.
To be clear, there are intermediate actions they could and should take, such as phase out of coal in favor of natural gas.
ACs, Refrigerators, and cars are still unavailable to the lower middle class. Even the middle class can only have 2 out of those 3.
A large chunk of public transport in the big cities in India and China is CNG and electric.
I guess now we're at the "okay okay fine, it's a problem, and humans are causing it. But we should still do nothing to fix it, because... China?"
Screaming right past the acceptance stage and in for another loop of denial.
But the US could go to zero and if China and India don't lower emission it won't matter.
Tragedy of the commons and all.
The proper framing is we need to reduce emissions and so does China and India so how do we facilitate that. The answer is to 1.) Reduce our own emissions to have the moral basis to push other countries to reduce their emissions. 2.) Tax imported goods based on the emissions created in their production. Incentivizing foreign countries to reduce their emissions to be competitive in US markets. 3.) Lobby other countries to do the same using the diplomatic means we have at our disposal.
Scientists have already said if we stop all emissions tomorrow, across the globe, we’re still hitting catastrophic climate change.
The boat to fix this left decades ago.
Beyond the point of no return now. Time to start moving to higher ground.
> But the US could go to zero and if China and India don't lower emission it won't matter.
Because if the US cut its emissions by half, the standard of living of US citizens (and its associated carbon cost) will become about the same as in China, and will still be a whopping 3.5 times better than India.
Looking at total emissions is actually meaningless, as reducing emissions (significantly) necessarily involves lowering the standard of living - less meat, less transportation, more expensive electricity, less stuff, less construction, less heating etc. The US and EU have a lot of place for reducing our CO2 by reducing our standards of living than India (which produces less CO2 per person than Sweden or any other country in the EU).
Sure, there is some amount of CO2 reduction that can be achieved by green power, but nowhere near enough at the scale and speed needed to avoid catastrophic climate change.
But, given how grave and urgent the situation is getting, there is no way to convert all curent energy generation to green energy AND increase energy generation capacity to keep up with normal economic growth AND increase it many times over to electrify all transportation AND electrify all heating. And even if we were to succeed in all that, that only covers about half of US emissions at best - the other half is coming from agriculture, industry and residential emissions. Not to mention the massive emissions that are happening in China but ultimately serving the US market.
It's simply not possible to achieve the necessary time frames (net 0 in 20 years) without significantly reducing economic activity and standards of living in the short term - then growing back to current activity and standards of living in the longer term.
Not to mention, much of China's emissions are actually coming from its factories supplying the US and Europe with goods. If we just give up on buying some of the goods, emissions will go down.
Finally, to call any measures on combatting climate change that were enacted anywhere in the world "overzealous" is laughable. The only measure stat can actually put a dent in the ever increasing temperatures are those that will come with economic contraction - not just stopping the growth, but actually downsize our economies for a decade or two - but this is completely unthinkable to liberals.
The best measures that are being taken today would have helped if they had been taken in the 1960s when the problem was first understood. Instead, we sacrificed the future for economic growth in the present, and are now doing minor improvements (wind and solar, electric cars) that will barely even reduce the rhythm at which emissions are increasing.
Similarly, you can send every person in the US back to the stone age, and you're still going to have about 80% of the problem unless you can get other countries to join along.
[0] https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by...
Emissions per capita are relevant if you want to discuss a realistic expectation of how low a country's emissions can go. They are also directly relevant: every citizen of a country must be fed, must be given electricity, must use transportation, and must consume goods - each of these cost CO2 in quite direct proportion to the number of citizens.
For example, China has a lot of room for improvement, but India does not, as it's already at lower emissions per capita than half the world (much lower than any EU country, for example).
Global warming is not exclusively the problem of the global south. Poor people in China or India have the same rights to affordable electricity as people in Norway or Germany, which have higher emissions than China per person, despite the fact that they have outsourced plenty of emissions to China.
Overall, if say we needed to reduce emissions by 50%, countries with higher emissions per capita will likely have to reduce MORE than that, as China and particularly India would incur much more harm to their hundreds of millions of citizens than Germany or the USA if they were to significantly reduce emissions.
Forgive the aggressive editing of your quote, but multiplying emissions per capita times the number of citizens is exactly emissions per country.
> want to discuss a realistic expectation of how low a country's emissions can go
Theoretically, most countries emissions could go to zero with nuclear, wind, solar, hydro, and/or geothermal. You can dive into the touchy feely stuff about people's quality of life, but it's easy to imagine a high quality of life in a country that went pure nuclear (zero added CO2). No new technology (battery storage) needed. However, if we're being realistic, you shouldn't expect any country to change much at all, and you'll find out how many people fear nuclear more than they fear fossil fuels.
In the link I posted above there are 15 sovereign nations which produce a higher CO2 per capita than the US. (As an aside, several of those countries have a strong interest in selling oil, so you aren't likely to sway them.) If you treat per capita as the important metric, and you successfully convince those 15 countries to go pure solar/nuclear/whatever, you've solved less than 5% of the problem. Lock your heels and stick to your guns, refuse to admit you're wrong, but this is an inefficient approach.
Contrast that with converting just China, the US, and India, to wind/geothermal/whatever and you've solved 50%.
I think this is the bad assumption that is causing you to think emissions per capita are not important. Power generation is only a fraction of the problem. Most clearly, GHG emissions from cows and pigs will not go down even if all electricity energy is produced with 0 emissions. Incidentally, India's widespread vegetarianism may be a big component of how its emissions are so low.
Then, transportation will not magically become electric even if the whole grid is green. Perhaps cars are a solved problem, but electric trucks, electric air planes, and electric cargo boats are definitely not solved problem, not for anywhere near today's costs.
There are of course numerous other industrial processes which emit massive amounts of CO2 that can't be electrified at all - cement production, smelting, plastic recycling, many chemical processes etc.
Also, new nuclear, hydro, solar, and wind are not competitive with already built coal or natural gas power plants - so moving to a new entirely green grid would massively increase the costs of electricity, which in turn will increase the costs of basically all consumer goods.
And while many in the USA and Europe could afford to pay twice the price of electricity and all basic necessities (though nowhere close to all), few would in India or China.
Now, would it be important and good to pressure and fund China, US and India to replace what they can of their electrical grids with nuclear and other green energies? Absolutely! But it only addresses a small part of the problem, and does so at tremendous cost.
Edit: electricity generation accounts for ~50% of China's GHG emissions, ~35% of India's and ~25% of the US's. So even entirely greenifying their grids will not reduce world GHG emissions by anywhere near 50%.
> Also, new nuclear, hydro, solar, and wind are not competitive with already built coal or natural gas power plants [...] costs
While this is completely true, if you stick to financial justification for changes, you aren't going to succeed anywhere. If any of the other methods were more cost effective in the short term, they'd already have switched.
I doubt it's fruitful to talk about any of this. You seem pretty certain you're right, and I doubt I could change your mind on anything.
That's not what I'm arguing. I'm arguing that no one country, or even small group of countries, can stop climate change alone, at least not without causing massive harm to their citizens. The entire world needs to participate, and countries that are producing the most GHG for the least amount of people need to do so most of all (though of course once you get to really really small countries, say Luxembourg, other factors become dominant).
My point is that India, particularly, can't realistically reduce emissions (without harming their citizens tremendously in the short term) by more than a few percents. Meanwhile, Europe, the Middle Eastern oil states, Russia, and the USA have much more room to reduce their emissions more drastically, and, combined, they will have a bigger effect, with much less harm to their own people. China absolutely needs to do more as well, and for them in particular green energy generation is lower hanging fruit (since so much of their emissions are coming from this).
The goal of this whole thing is to move as fast as possible to ensure the planet remains livable 100 years from now, without sacrificing poor peasants' already meager lifestyles in China and India (and anywhere else) today.
And now sure, an argument could be made that rather than building nucelar reactors in France, French money could be better invested in building nuclear reactors in China - that is, that the world's limited capacity for building green energy should be best invested in the places that need power the most while currently having the worst way of getting it. I would be amenable to such an argument, though I think it's more utopic than my previous ones.
We seem to be going through stages of climate denialism: Climate change doesn't exist -> it does exist but it isn't man made -> it is man made but it's too expensive and disruptive to fix -> ???
This is not true. We are all in the same frying pan and I don't know why people keep insisting that the others don't understand it. Of course they do. They have political pressures from industrialists and deniers just as we do here that might prevent immediate action, but they are not fundamentally different. Quite the opposite.
Either way, why do we have to wait for others to move first. We know there's a problem, we know there are solutions, get to it.
That being said I see no reason why doing any of the things mainstream scientists and economists are calling for would in any way diminish anyone's quality of life. If anything it will improve quality of life at the very least by reducing air pollution and it will prevent drastic reductions in quality of life in the coming decades from the effects of unchecked global warming.
I really don't know where this crap even comes from. Like we get x amount of energy from fossil fuels. Therefore we must reduce energy usage by that much? Do you think that's what we're advocating for?
Source: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/understanding-global-warmin...
Over a 20 year period, it is about 85x more harmful
In the pre-industrial era the oceans outgassed CO2 to the atmosphere to prevent land plants from suffocating themselves by sequestering all the carbon dioxide. In the post-industrial era the oceans capture a significant percentage of the CO2 that humans generate (because CO2 is heavier than air, and easily dissolves in water).
The most important considerations for the earth's atmospheric heat balance are the heat inputs from the sun (solar cycle) and underwater volcanoes, and the shielding provided by volcanic eruptions. The oceans store heat during the summer, and release heat during the winter.
My previous comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20002823 / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20013166
from the article:
> according to data released in January by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
an encyclopedia like Wikipedia is, by its very nature, going to lag behind the cutting edge of published research on this topic.
this article might eventually become a source cited in an edit to the Wikipedia page for that "current outlook" section.
The carbon used to be deep underground, and now it's in the atmosphere. Where does half of it go? I know that it ends up as part of a photosynthetic organism, but then later that plant decays and its back in the atmosphere again, right?
And given a changing climate, can we rely on the atmosphere->plant rate remaining constant for enough for our ideas about the half lives of various greenhouse gasses to remain relevant?
But there's a good article I found now which might shed more light : https://euanmearns.com/the-half-life-of-co2-in-earths-atmosp...
Notice that you can look at the GWP potential over time spans. For methane, over the next 100 years (which is the period that will impact most HNers the most) it is at least 20x as impactful as CO2.
The reason this matters is because the biggest unknown with climate change is positive feed backs. A classic example of this is that as the arctic has less ice it also reduces the albedo of the oceans allowing them to absorb even more heat faster.
Another, methane related, theoretical, positive feed back is methane clathrates which are essentially frozen stores of methane deep in the arctic ocean. If the ocean were to warm up enough this might rapidly release methane leading to a catastrophic runaway warming scenario, leading to what is suspected to have caused rapid climate change in the Quanternary period [1].
It is currently believed by many researchers that, in the specific case of the 'clathrate gun' firing, it is unlikely to happen. The trouble is we don't know for sure. That is just one unknown, potentially devastating positive feed back.
If you read Peter Ward's work (and some others as well) it looks like at various times in the history of the planet there was very rapid, very destructive climate change that was caused by a cascading series of positive feed backs. We don't know exactly where these are, but the more methane we release (and CO2) and the faster the planet warms the more likely we are to find these.
It is important to note also, that these positive feedbacks are not factored into the IPCC report (just like the potential collapse of Thwaites Glacier is not) because the is no way to effectively model this and make predictions about them. It means that if you think the IPCC report sounds bad (or even if you don't) there is a lot of potential risk not mentioned in the various pathways there.
We'd be looking at a very different planet by then with higher see levels, higher temperatures, and a lot less ice on Greenland, Antartica, and most mountains. You can haggle about just how bad things would get in terms of temperature rises, and sea level rises. But lets just say it wouldn't be very good. It would recover eventually. But the problem is that that recovery process is going to take thousands of years.
> a large amount of methane is trapped within a crystal structure of water, forming a solid similar to ice. Originally thought to occur only in the outer regions of the Solar System, where temperatures are low and water ice is common, significant deposits of methane clathrate have been found under sediments on the ocean floors of the Earth.
deposits of solid methane ice can exist trapped on the seafloor [1]. this is possible only at the extreme pressures of the seafloor [2].
so, on its own, a little methane in the atmosphere is not a big deal, because of the short half-life.
except, you have methane ice deposits in the ocean that can melt if the oceans get a little bit warmer.
this can enter into a fun little runaway feedback loop pretty quickly. little bit of methane melts, causing a little bit more ocean warming, causing more methane to melt, etc.
if this feedback loop were to occur, the evidence you would expect to see would be spontaneous release of methane emissions from the ocean, and you would expect it to be happening in places where the warming ocean put methane clathrates right at their melting point for that depth & pressure of seawater. which...is exactly what's happening [3]
> The study, to appear in the journal Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, a journal of the American Geophysical Union, shows that of 168 bubble plumes observed within the past decade, a disproportionate number were seen at a critical depth for the stability of methane hydrates.
> "We see an unusually high number of bubble plumes at the depth where methane hydrate would decompose if seawater has warmed," said lead author H. Paul Johnson, a UW professor of oceanography. "So it is not likely to be just emitted from the sediments; this appears to be coming from the decomposition of methane that has been frozen for thousands of years."
a similar feedback loop is possible in the Arctic tundra [4], where permafrost can melt and release trapped bubbles of gases that include methane, which in turn will warm the planet a bit and cause more permafrost to melt.
and of course the two feedback loops are able to reinforce each other, because a bit of methane released from the arctic also helps heat the oceans, and a bit of methane released by the oceans also helps melt the permafrost.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane_clathrate
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane_clathrate#/media/File:...
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Methane_Hydrate_phase_dia...
3: https://www.ocean.washington.edu/story/Bubble_plumes_suggest...
Responding to several comments: yes, we need to get rid of the excess CO2. In fact when CH4 is broken down (mostly via hydroxyl† or, over oceans, Cl reactions) you end up with CO2 anyway.
So, as you ask, why worry about CH4?
The radiative forcing function of CH4 is, depending on your baseline, 30-80X‡ worse than C02. The rise in methane levels from 750 ppbv to 1900 ppbv is believed to have raised the temperature by as much as 0.5 C. So eliminating it buys more time to work on other problems.
The second problem is you can't really eliminate* emissions -- they come from diverse sources, almost all of them natural. You can see this in that the 750 ppbv level that was reasonably flat before the widespread adoption of the steam engine (around 1775 when Watt and Boulton got their patent)** -- emission and oxidation/removal were roughly balanced. Another way to look at it is that 1900 ppbv today was all emitted over the last decade, whether "naturally" or not.
I put "naturally" in quotation marks because yes, some would be emitted anyway without humans, but most of the emissions that come from humans are from biological activity that would not otherwise have occurred: primarily agriculture, but also fossil fuel extraction. If we somehow stopped all the latter it would cut anthropogenic emission by perhaps a third; livestock maybe the same amount, or maybe half in aggregate. But you aren't going to stop growing crops or dumping stuff in landfill.
And many of these sources are quite diffuse; oilfields result in lots of seepage, and who can fit a catalytic converter to a swamp?
And of course methane bursts from melting tundra heating continental shelves and the like -- not sure anybody has an idea how much of that there is. You can see craters from these bursts if you walk around in the arctic. And as the article mentions, it's not just the frozen methane, but as the frozen tundra melts decomposition accelerates. One can imagine a significantly large offshore burst that could wipe out agriculture for a few years -- probably a bad thing if you are a fan of vertebrates.
If you want to know what human activity bugs me the most, its not livestock, it's a transition to natural gas (methane, basically) as a "greener" fuel for transport, heating and electricity generation. More gas means more leaks and emissions and further cooking of the planet. And when those ships have been launched and power plants built they'll be in operation for decades because of that's how long they'll take to depreciate. The EU has come out in favor of this; the IMO is encouraging shipping to make the transition, and of course some countries depend on its export.
PS: everyone makes cow fart jokes but a point of trivia: it's actually cow burps as the cow is a ruminant.
† For unknown reasons OH levels last year seem to have dropped. Eek!
‡ These calculations are arcane, depending on what parameters you're trying to compare. We just use 30X in the company.
* There are various projects to eradicate point sources: barns, landfills, some old mines. We need more of that too.
** OK, obviously some coal was burnt before the Boulton and Watt engine and adoption was not instantaneous but you can see the bend right around the end of the 18th century.
Edit: add the point about gas being considered a "green" fuel.
We're in the stage of scaling up a process from lab scale to deployment scale. Most of the theoretical and experimental science in this area has been done at institutions in Germany, France and Denmark and while the company is international the engineering development is in SV.
TBH there's a lot more to do than just some engineering and validation: regulation, environmental studies, social acceptance, etc -- about as much as engineering itself.
The company is named Blue Dot Change (bluedotchange.com) -- trying to restore the planet to the lovely blue dot from the photos from space. Yes all startups ultimately need a new, less nerdly name. Right now the web site doesn't say much -- basically clip art and a little text.
Since this is HN:
- The architecture is nice: a large number of small devices, which allows a lot of scaling and all the other nice operational and cost features you'd expect (but no, no need for some sort of k8s to manage them :-).
- Yes, we're hiring: experienced ME, EE, and ChemE; in a few months we'll need a couple of more deep embedded/instrumentation programmers.
- And we are continuing to fundraise, by pre-selling carbon credits. Since we are making relatively small devices, we don't need one of those crazy $100MM rounds you'd need to develop a new kind of oil refinery or nuke. If we do decide we need that for some crazy phase of scaling we can to that then.
Thanks for the additional detail.
As an analogy, my home reverse osmosis filter doesn't even come close to touching things that are in the parts per billion.
Also, it isn't as if atmospheric methane is evenly distributed across the globe [0]. How do you expect to collect methane across borders?
As for concentration: that's an excellent question. I'm not sure how much I should say right now (though as soon as some of the scientists appear on our website it'll be obvious from their publication record, if the comms "team" -- really just part of one person -- hasn't already written more by then). I can tell you that the lab work we are scaling up just used outside air -- a pipe stuck out the window -- as its air source, not some special high concentration mixture made in the lab.
I believe you can buy home water filters that extract higher molecular weight contaminants like arsenic in low ppb levels, but I'm not sure how applicable that really is :-)
edit: I just looked at my profile and it appears not to have been updated since I created my account
Wonder how much damage the billions of gallons of off gassing is costing the country and world from the Bakken fracking fields (North Dakota, eastern Montana)
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/at-night-giant-fie...
Well. We had a good run. Time to pack up the board.
EDIT: this apparently is one of my most disliked comments. To clarify, my point is that we can’t have both unlimited population growth and a high quality of life without accepting environmental impacts. If a high population of people have to crowd into dense micro apartments and give up cars and face constant bans on things they like, then their environmental footprint may reduce but their quality of life will go down. On the other hand if population controls were instituted, then a high quality of life could be possible with a sustainable level of environmental impact.
I really don't buy this, it seems illogical to me.
We have technologies that can produce a rich and comfortable life with much less or zero emissions, nuclear, renewables. We don't need to fuck stuff up as bad as we have. We've fucked stuff up this bad because of lobbying, resources companies have lobbied and fought long and hard to keep selling this poison to the world. To keep us buying cars that use petroleum. To keep people believing that it's either oil and coal or you're going back to the stone age it's bull shit because oil and coal is the stone age.
If you buy into those technologies I've mentioned above, you don't really have to entirely give up the life you know, in fact you might get to keep the life you love and have cleaner, better air to breathe.
We've woken up, but we still have those cretins doing their dirty work (the Australian Government for example.
We've woken up but it might be too late now.
There are only two options:
1. Split more nuclei, fuse nuclei at +EROEI, and collect more photons.
2. 4 billion people starve to death.
Population control was a fun idea in the 1970s, but that ship has already sailed. We either experience mass die-offs, or we engineer our way out. Full stop.
I think of space colonies as being protection from some catastrophic event on earth, not as an answer to climate change.
It's not like we could move significant numbers of people off the planet... and if we can build a spaceship or habitat on another planet that people can survive (and thrive) in, it would be much much easier to build the same habitat here on earth. I would bet that even building an underwater city would be much easier than a moon colony or orbiting space station.
These days it's flanked by a much darker counter: well at least space would provide a society that has reproduction under control with a reasonably wide moat from breeders.
Rather than spending the next few hundred years going round and round in ever-decreasing circles, obsessing over reducing the human impact on the planet to negligible levels using limited technological advances, while remaining largely inward-looking and ensconced within our gravity well.
I find that there's a weird mixture of pessimism (billions will die of starvation within 30 years) and hubris (we need to adopt measure X so that we can achieve Y degrees of warming by 2050, rather than Y+1 degrees) that has categorised the more prominent Malthusian technocrats over the last few decades (such as the Club of Rome, and then the IPCC).