- Methane is more than 25 times as potent as carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere.
- Methane is the second most abundant anthropogenic GHG after carbon dioxide (CO2), accounting for about 20 percent of global emissions.
https://www.epa.gov/gmi/importance-methane
https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica...
> Methane is generally a secondary byproduct in the industrial processes from which it is emitted. Coal mines, for example, seek to vent methane from the mine workings because it can cause explosions. Historically, mining companies have not viewed the associated methane as an energy resource in its own right.
It's mostly associated with fossil fuel extraction so the other solution to the methane problem is decreasing fossil fuel consumption in general.
Because we're still increasing the rate at which we emit other greenhouses gases, and even if we emitted none anymore a lot of warming is already locked in.
All efforts to combat global warming about reducing or eliminating the acceleration. If one of those methods is both cheap and has a fairly high impact (which, methane reduction appears to be) then why are we focusing on "but this doesn't eliminate global warming"?
Adding renewables and nuclear to the grid won't eliminate global warming, but they slow it down. Eliminating methane appears to be a route where we can more aggressively stomp on the breaks.
The only time I've seen that argument raised is for the opposite "Because this won't fix global warming, we shouldn't do it?".
Global warming will require a multifaceted approach to be solve. No one solution will fix it, so literally any solution is going to have a detractor that says "This won't fix it, so why bother with it?"
Reducing and fixing or eliminating are not the same thing. How could they have worded the title better? "Limiting methane emissions will have an outsized impact given the cost"?
It's also true that increasing global average warming can result in reduced warming and temperatures in some geographic areas so it is important to be specific with terminology depending on which aspect of the climate change debate we're talking about. You are right that the title is unintentionally misleading in this regard.
The rate of emissions just controls how much more warming and how much sooner the existing warming will occur.
This is one of the core problems with Human responses to the problem: people think they can wait until it gets 'bad enough' then stop their emissions and things will improve. But they will keep getting worse because of the lag between emissions and effects.
As for CO2 vs Methane, Methane is responsible for about 20% of all man made warming (1). So eliminating it completely would still leave 80% of warming... This is because we emit a lot, lot more CO2 than Methane.
The division is really a false one IMHO, because a lot of methane comes from coal mining and oil/gas extraction. So unless you stop using fossil fuels (the number 1 CO2 source) you cannot stop methane emissions...
> The division is really a false one IMHO, because a lot of methane comes from coal mining and oil/gas extraction. So unless you stop using fossil fuels (the number 1 CO2 source) you cannot stop methane emissions...
But if you can eliminate that 20% with minimal effort or expenditure, why wouldn't you?
Most of that is coming from emissions related to fossil fuel extraction. Which is a perfect opportunity for capture.
CO2 emissions, on the other hand, is coming from a million different sources and doesn't have a single clean solution. There's not a one step process for eliminating 20% of CO2 emissions.
You have to account for reversing all of the profligate methane producing swampland, turning it back into swampland, to fully account for this as part of the calculation.
We've done planetscale engineering already by how much methane we've reduced by converting swamp to farm/urban land.