Methane goes away after 20 years. Carbon Dioxide stays around for thousands of years. We should spend 100% of our resources transitioning to extremely cheap sustainable electric energy.
That is the only option for turning the tide on climate
That is the only option for turning the tide on climate
Methane is a much more potent GHG than Carbon (about 8-30x), and is a big chunk of the emissions (about 20%).
In fact after 20 years of being worse than carbon dioxide, it mostly turns into carbon dioxide and then hangs around for millenia, meaning it is categorically worse.
This too is inaccurate. CO2 has a half-life in the atmosphere variously stated between 27 and 49 years.
If the world magically went zero Co2 today, The atmospheric levels would decrease about 2.5%/yr
>it mostly turns into carbon dioxide and then hangs around for millenia, meaning it is categorically worse.
Where are you citing your numbers from?
A quick Google suggests it's a Climate Change Denial source:
http://euanmearns.com/the-half-life-of-co2-in-earths-atmosph...
And even they cite the climate scientists as saying hundreds of years (before going on to prove them wrong in their blog post of course):
> We hear all the time form the climate science community that even if we stop burning fossil fuels (FF) today the CO2 we have already produced will still be in the atmosphere for centuries to come. We have already lit a long slow burning fuse that will lead us to climate Armageddon. How much of this is actually true?
Headline numbers like 1,000s of years are are always talking about about a fraction of emitted CO2.
Like radiation, CO2 Decay has an infinite tail. When it is "gone" depends on how much you are talking about (50%, 90%, 99.9% ect)
CO2 decay is complicated because there are several removal pathways, and some cap out, and some keep going.
The IPCC doesn't talk about it in terms of half-life because it isn't true exponential decay. The 2007 Report said the following:
"Carbon dioxide cycles between the atmosphere, oceans and land biosphere. Its removal from the atmosphere involves a range of processes with different time scales. About 50% of a CO2 increase will be removed from the atmosphere within 30 years, and a further 30% will be removed within a few centuries. The remaining 20% may stay in the atmosphere for many thousands of years" * More recent reports essentially provide an asterisk that says its complicated.
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ar4-wg1-chap...
So the fact that "going away" in this context means "is replaced by carbon dioxide, which stays for thousands of years" seems a rather important part of the total warming potential of the two greenhouse gasses.
We will almost certainly soon be able to track cattle based emissions via satellite and use that to enforce usage of the various solutions we have (seaweed based food supplements apparently work) and/or price in the externality.
Here's some work on that from the same info source used for the above:
https://www.ghgsat.com/en/newsroom/cow-burps-seen-from-space...