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Comment by slackfan | Hacker News Reader

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I realize you're just trolling, but science is quite settled that anthropogenic climate change is a real ting.

Minutae about whether methane is 28x as bad as co2 or merely 20x as bad remains to be settled. Please don't exploit people's good faith interest in getting the exact truth to advance bad faith claims.

I am being pedantic, but there is no such thing as settled science. No matter how solid a theory is, no matter how well-proven, it will remain unsettled in perpetuity.

What utter tripe. Water is made of hydrogen and oxygen and we know their chemical properties exceedingly well. Endlessly splitting hairs that it's not "settled" when someone puts another digit of accuracy at the end of the accepted mass of a proton isn't being pedantic, it's just being pompous.

And yet comparing a simple chemical composition of water and the effects of a particular gas on a large and very poorly understood system is somehow less tripe?

Please.

The greenhouse effect is not "poorly understood" and the link between CO2 and climate is clearly established over millions of years of geologic time. If you have trouble understanding how this is done, I recommend you read more instead of posting on hackernews. You could start here:

https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=co2+and...

I never said the greenhouse effect was poorly understood, however I will for a fact state that the overall climate system of earth is relatively poorly understood. If you must insist on making wild strawman arguments, I recommend you read and understand what you read more before you start posting anywhere.

> science is quite settled that anthropogenic climate change is a real ting.

This study seems to suggest there has been a lot of research into how methane causes warming, but little research into how it may cause cooling.

> The corresponding climate impacts, however, have been only indirectly evaluated and thus remain largely unquantified.

Then - right off the bat - this study finds a substantial cooling effect.

This hardly rules out the possibility of additional undiscovered cooling effects.

It suggests to me that additional research is needed into how all these greenhouse gasses may have cooling effects.

If it is settled based on data that is as reliable as this (40% off!) then it is not settled at all.

So we go from 28x to 20x. That changes the slope of a line but not the direction, or the magnitude.

30% change sounds large, until you multiply it by the fraction of the problem that methane forms. It's still a welcome impact reduction, if true, but yeah you're quite right.

Dutch farmers must be thrilled.

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