Could you explain further?
How does:
> reducing methane emissions won't change a thing, compared to CO2 emissions.
Follow from:
> once methane emissions reach a steady level
How does:
> reducing methane emissions won't change a thing, compared to CO2 emissions.
Follow from:
> once methane emissions reach a steady level
If we removed literally all methane from the atmosphere, this would be equivalent to reducing carbon dioxide concentration to 380 ppm. This would bring us back to climate of 2005. By any reasonable measure, climate in 2023 is not significantly different than the climate in 2005 (eg. you’d hardly be able to observe any difference without making a lot of very careful measurements, you wouldn’t “feel” any difference on your own skin).
And that’s if we remove literally all methane. Most of the methane in atmosphere is a result of natural processes, not caused by human activity. Thus, if we stop all methane emissions caused by human activity, we can maybe at best slow down climate change by 10 years. In terms of practical effects as felt by human beings, this is accurately described as “won’t change a thing”. Actually, to be more specific, slowing climate change by 10 years won’t make any difference, but stopping all methane emitting activities would be tremendously negative to human flourishing.
Global Warming Potential of Methane over a 20 year Time period is a bit more than 80 times that of CO2. https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/understanding-global-warmin...
So, redrawing your path by your method, if we remove ALL of the Atmospheric Methane today, we would be reducing GHG concentrations by about 160ppm CO2 equivalent, which takes the overall CO2 concentrations to less than that of pre-industrial levels(280ppm), 260ppm.
This negates your conclusion that we would hardly observe ANY difference.
If we remove literally all of the Methane today, we would have solved Global warming from the perspective of concentration of Green House gases and will just have to wait and watch for the Global Temperatures to catch up (meaning they will go down).
Where in the linked document it says that? Because I do not think it’s true.
GWP calculations has been an active area of research for a long time.
For instance, if you look up the table beneath the VALUES side-heading in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_potential, you would notice that from 1995IPCC to the recent one, Scientists are getting more and more closer to ~80 GWP.
'Devastating' melt of Greenland, Antarctic ice sheets found https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35657570
This was here just yesterday. You may not feel it "on your own skin", but Earth does. And what exactly will happen when we'll lose all ice, we simply do not know. We just know it won't be pretty.
> stopping all methane emitting activities would be tremendously negative to human flourishing
How? I smell bullsh*t.
Actually no, I don't think you would because raising/using cattle would not be allowed if we stopped all methane emitting activities. Also your farts can contain methane, so you'd have to hold them in ... forever. If you've ever had to do that during a long meeting, you should know it is negative to human fluorishing.
Giving up hamburgers and farting is not the only thing we'd have to do. I get the feeling you didn't think very hard about GP's comment before arrogantly and ignorantly dismissing them as bullshit. If you honestly think a world where only the wealthy had heated homes and many other products that everybody now takes for granted won't negatively effect human fluorishing, I'd be (truly) interested in hearing why, such as what would either replace those things or why we would no longer need them.
- Livestock farming: Methane is produced during the digestive process of ruminant animals such as cows, sheep, and goats. Therefore, animal agriculture is a significant contributor to methane emissions.
- Energy production: Methane is the primary component of natural gas, which is commonly used for heating and electricity generation. Methane can also be released during the extraction, transportation, and distribution of natural gas.
- Waste management: Methane is produced during the decomposition of organic waste in landfills, wastewater treatment facilities, and manure management systems.
- Fossil fuel production: Methane can be released during the extraction and processing of coal, oil, and gas.
- Biomass burning: Methane can be produced during the incomplete combustion of biomass, such as wood or crop residues.
- Agricultural practices: Methane can be emitted during rice cultivation, as well as through the use of fertilizers and manure in agriculture.
Ok, so let's stop using fossil oils and animal agriculture (let's ignore human farts for a moment).
How could that be detrimental for human flourishing, I ask? Are the burgers essential for humans to flourish? I don't think so.
Benefits of burning fossil fuels are extremely obvious, so I shouldn’t even need to list these — for one thing, they make the discussion we have now possible in the first place. Many of current uses of fossil fuels can be replaced by other sources of energy, though at higher cost. Higher cost of energy necessarily means we get to spend less on other things, which entails less flourishing in aggregate.
Wealthy billions. The poor ones don't eat as much meat and dairy. And it's a good thing ... if they did, we would need not one, but 4-5 Earths to feed everyone.
Eating meat is a culture. A story we tell ourselves. It cost us all of megafauna, half of our forests, it threatens thousands of animal species with extinction, and it should go. It can't go for much longer if we want to have any future.
> Higher cost of energy
Costs are human construct. Money is just a record in someone's database. Goverments can make as much as they want. It means nothing.
> necessarily means we get to spend less on other things
We will learn what has value when we'll eat the system to the ground.
Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying: less energy consumption pretty much directly translates to less human flourishing. You seem to be arguing that this is a good thing (which I disagree with), but you keep supporting my claim with more evidence, so please, concede this.
> Costs are human construct. Money is just a record in someone's database. Goverments can make as much as they want. It means nothing.
This is not so. If that was the case, poor countries could become rich by their governments printing more money. Zimbabwe tried, they did get more money, but did not get any wealth.
The point here is that money represents something very real and significant, which a claim on value produced in the economy. If you just “change records in someone’s database”, you’ll only have more money chasing the same amount of goods, ie. inflation. If you, however, force people to use different, more expensive sources of energy, the impact is very real: less of stuff in total gets produced, and so the society gets to consume less in aggregate. This means less flourishing.
> less energy consumption pretty much directly translates to less human flourishing
You're like the man who floats on the sea on the raft made from coconuts. The more he eats, the more he thinks he flourishes.
Sharks are meanwhile patiently circling around.
> Zimbabwe tried, they did get more money, but did not get any wealth
Not everybody has the guts and means to organize few coups & occupy some countries first, steal their oil and other natural resources, then build mega army and spread it around half a world.
But if they did, then it would work. It's a recipe that works everytime.
Inflation is irrelevant. I've studied economics ... it's hogwash.
I call the above statement hogwash. Let’s take your proposal to the logical extreme. If inflation is hogwash, then why do we have to tax the citizens? Why not just print the money we need to run the government? Why do we have a national debt if we could just print the money we need to pay it off? We could try your proposal by I don’t think it would end well.
Instead I'll recommend works of David Graeber [0], mainly his treatise Debt and The Dawn. [1][2] I'll throw in his Bullshit Jobs, just because. [3]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Graeber
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything:_A_New_...
> How could that be detrimental for human flourishing, I ask? Are the burgers essential for humans to flourish? I don't think so.
Disclaimer: I decided to interpret the comment as disagreeing with me because it seemed like the most plausible interpretation giving the ambiguous potential use of sarcasm, but it's very possible I misinterpreted.
The burgers and the farts were an attempt at humor.
A much more serious consideration (also in my original) is heating our homes. If you have ever been homeless longer than a day or two during cold months in a cold place (I spent 6 months this way), you pretty quickly learn how important modern climate controls are. I don't see how you can "fluorish" when you're freezing your ass off. Good luck getting the sleep you need to perform either physical or mental work, which currently is needed in order to fluorish (unless you think the homeless on the street are fluorishing). If you're lucky your employer will be able to heat their office so you could live there, but not everybody works for someone like that. The wealthy would be able to buy whatever they needed (electric heaters, solar panels, battery storage, the high labor costs of retrofitting all these things, assuming these are even still available after the long chain of dependency is broken) but the vast majority of people would not. Human fluorishing is not just comfort for the wealthy. The average person's life matters. Much of what advances our human condition come from people who aren't born into wealth.
How exactly do you propose to heat the average person's home when all fossil fuels are no longer available? And any derivative products of fossil fuels such as plastics? Keep in mind even bio-plastics made from corn and other products would not be nearly as available since we would lose orders of magnitude of production capacity by no longer being able to use fertilizers, tractors and other machinery, etc.
I guess we should probably establish what "human fluorishing" even means otherwise this discussion is pointless. If your idea of human fluorishing is where a massive perecentage of human labor is doing farm work again like in the 19th century, or going back to feudalism where we all work the Lord's land and pick his crops. My definition is where human quality and standard of life continually increases. We're not perfect right now (especially with life expectancies in the US dropping) but our current situation would look like a future paradise compared to what we'd have without any fossil fuel.
Atom & renewable sources. 256x256 km of solar panels is enough for whole world.
> And any derivative products of fossil fuels such as plastics
You mean trash (99% of plastics produced)? Stop producing it.
> fertilizers
Use regenerative agriculture. Agriculture can perfectly well function without fossil fuel inputs.
> tractors and other machinery
Electric tractors. Should have been here decades ago.
> your idea of human fluorishing is where a massive perecentage of human labor is doing farm work again like in the 19th century
Maybe we shouldn't insist on 70+ % of workers working bullshit jobs, and let instead few of them work in agriculture instead. Many would like it, if they could support themselves with it.
It's only because of the exploitation of the soil, natural resources and humans, that current agricultural practices prevail. If it would mean that our food production would not be dependent on use of poisons, i think that would be good thing for everybody.
> fluorishing
Humour?
> Electric tractors. Should have been here decades ago.
Those sound like great ideas. How about we roll them out first, and only stop using fossil fuels once they're able to totally replace them with no downside, instead of giving up heat and tractors indefinitely in the meantime?
We have to decide to stop using the bad stuff first, set the deadlines, or new stuff will never materialize.
Have you noticed how Tesla started electric cars, everybody laughed, and now they're the only way forward?
It will be the same with this ... sooner or later. And the change of focus will bring innovation we can't even imagine now.
But Tesla was super successful even though ICE cars still aren't banned.
>> Electric tractors. Should have been here decades ago.
> Those sound like great ideas. How about we roll them out first,
> and only stop using fossil fuels once they're able to totally
> replace them with no downside
All these things are already here. Nuclear power is nothing new, renewable methods of generating energy are growing fast, and electric tractors are already on the market.
How expensive they are and how fast they are common does not depend only on the market, but also on the policies we have.
There are subsidies and policies in place to protect the status quo. Without demolishing the existing barriers of entry no progres can be made.
If we accept "cheap" energy from coal plans as standard, and wait for new miraculous technology to compete with subsidized coal energy on price, without any support, it simply won't (and didn't) happen.
But say you'll phase out coal plans, and almost miraculously the effort materializes and is redirected to new areas and new solutions are found.
Wait for it to happen on it's own, and only thing you'll get is cancer from the soot and scorched earth.
The OP has an excellent point which you didn't address them: most methane in the atmosphere is from natural causes. When the amount due to humans is removed, the effect on heating is not very significant in comparison of our CO2 emissions.
Stated another way, the OP is warning against premature optimization focusing our energy on issues that are an order of magnitude away from the main process.
If this were a conversation about a C loop, we wouldn't be emotional about it and we'd could argue better (for example, methane production also releases green house gases)
To riff off your programming analogy, climate action is like a program that requires a thousand complicated, interdependent functions to be written for it to do its job. Unfortunately in our analogy, virtually none of them ever speak to one another, so the process will be hard, some people will try to bypass other people's contributions - even if they're better - for want of understanding, and the whole thing will be an organic mess.
The difference is, if the program doesn't do what it says, that's kind of fine. If we don't meet or exceed carbon goals, many people around the world are likely to die.
We aren't because we don't actually care.
"Human activities contribute significantly to the total amount of methane emissions in the atmosphere. According to the Global Methane Budget, human activities account for about 60% of global methane emissions, while natural sources account for the remaining 40%.
To put this into perspective, it is estimated that human activities emit about 330 million metric tons of methane per year, while natural sources emit about 230 million metric tons per year. Human activities that contribute to methane emissions include livestock farming, waste management, and energy production, as well as other activities such as rice cultivation and biomass burning.
While natural sources of methane, such as wetlands and wildfires, are also significant contributors to methane emissions, human activities have increased the amount of methane in the atmosphere by about 150% since pre-industrial times. Therefore, reducing human emissions of methane is crucial for mitigating the impacts of climate change."
- ChatGPT
If we really cared about CO2 emissions we'd lower and strictly enforce interstate speed to 50 mpg. My Golf's milage goes up 30-40% when I drive 55 vs 80 (any slower is dangerous with 70+ traffic). All for an extra six minutes of commute time.
We don't actually care about emissions, not enough to do something meaningful about it. So we buy stupid electric cars and go on about cow farts. It's all posturing and virtue signaling.
https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-...
Arctic sea ice extent is currently tracking the 2010-2020 average. Nothing much is happening in terms of Arctic sea ice extent at the moment and that's been true for a while. There has been a steady decline since 1979, which is the earliest year Charctic shows. But data exists for much longer. This is unfortunately standard for climatology, they truncate many data sets starting at this time and then declare records based on that truncated data set. That's not because nobody cared about the poles before the 80s, people definitely did.
Here are some examples. In the 1990 IPCC report, we can see satellite data for the Arctic going back to ~1972 and it shows a huge rise in sea ice extent during that decade ([1], p224, figure 7.20). This data is no longer shown on modern graphs.
This 1985 report [2] is by the US Department of Energy "Office of Basic Sciences Carbon Dioxide Research Division", it covers many topics around the construction of global climate models. Figure 5.2 on page 181 shows data on sea ice extents going back to the 1920s, citing Vinnikov et al. It shows a massive fall in sea ice from the 1920s to about 1955, when it turns around and starts climbing again. This data is corroborated by news reports. In the 1920s there were reports about melting ice caps. These were the dustbowl years and the 20s-30s were very hot. But in the middle of the century that turned around and by the mid 1960s the climate had been cooling for decades. The NYT reported [3] that:
The United States and the Soviet Union are mounting large‐scale investigations to determine why the Arctic climate is becoming more frigid, why parts of the Arctic sea ice have recently become ominously thicker and whether the extent of that ice cover contributes to the onset of ice ages.
Sea ice continued to thicken and by 1975 newspapers were reporting a consensus of experts that the future had a lot more ice in it, claims made credible by the growing Arctic ice conditions [4]:
In the last decade, the Arctic ice and snow cap has expanded 12%, and for the first time this century ships making for Iceland ports have been impeded by drifting sea ice [...] Many climatologists see this as evidence that a significant shift in climate is taking place [....] No scientists are predicting a full-scale Ice Age soon, but some predict that in a few decades there might be little ice ages
So the Arctic and Antarctic have changed quite a bit in the 20th century. They grow, they shrink, and scientists know this but no longer are willing to show these old datasets because the picture they paint is not a very interesting one. It certainly would not convince anyone that climatology is the key to saving the planet from doom.
[1] https://archive.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/far/wg_I/ipcc_far_wg_I_c...
[2] https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/5885458
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/1970/07/18/archives/us-and-soviet-pr...
[4] https://chicagotribune.newspapers.com/search/?query=%20new%2...
In the early 1970s, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) launched the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) sensor, which provided more detailed and accurate measurements of snow cover extent and duration in the Arctic.
The extent of Arctic snow cover has varied considerably from year to year, but in general, there has been a decreasing trend in snow cover extent and duration since the late 1960s. According to data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), the Arctic snow cover extent has decreased at a rate of approximately 4% per decade since the late 1960s.
In recent years, there have been some variations in snow cover extent, with some years showing slightly more snow cover than others. However, the overall trend has been towards less snow cover and a shorter snow cover season.
The decrease in Arctic snow cover is thought to be due to a combination of factors, including rising temperatures, changes in precipitation patterns, and changes in the Arctic's sea ice cover. The loss of snow cover has significant impacts on the Arctic ecosystem and can contribute to further warming and changes in the region.
[0] ChatGPT
The glaciers all around the world are melting. Polar bears are drowning. While world is 1-1.5C warmer, in polar areas it's 5C and more.
There were many papers claiming that smoking doesn't cause any harm. 97% of scientists agree that climate change/crisis is human made and bad. The scientific consensus is what matters.
Polar bears are doing fine, by the way.
https://polarbearscience.com/2023/02/23/published-field-stud...
So it was not in early 1970s, it was in the late 1970s, and it was not in early 1980s. You both were pretty close.
> Polar bears are doing fine, by the way.
Good to hear. For now at least. If true.
"In 2004, biologists discovered four drowned polar bears in the Beaufort Sea. Never before observed, biologists attributed the drowning to a combination of retreating ice and rougher seas. As a result of rapid ice melt in 2011, a female polar bear reportedly swam for nine days nonstop across the Beaufort Sea before reaching an ice floe, costing her 22 percent of her weight and her cub. As climate change melts sea ice, the U.S. Geological Survey projects that two thirds of polar bears will disappear by 2050." [2]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_very-high-resolution_... [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210426213549/https://www.usgs.... [2] https://nwf.org/Educational-Resources/Wildlife-Guide/Mammals...
"AVHRR data have been collected continuously since 1981"
ChatGPT was off by a decade!
I hope nobody will confuse an anecdote about a handful of bears from 2004 with robust science.
At any rate, going back to the original non-bear related claims that you're picking a fight with, those outlets were in both cases reporting measurements and claims made by scientists.
Indeed, you could argue that they aren't reliable and the reality was different, but then you'd have to concede that in the past "consensus climate science" has been wrong across the board and thus that this is also a possibility today.
I think in reality the claims made about basic weather stats back then were probably true, or at least as true as they could get at the time. Climatology was too new and too small to have been politicized in the same way it is today. And newspapers had a different ethos around trying to present facts neutrally, they also were less politicized than today. But by all means, argue that the global consensus of scientists (both US and Soviet no less) was wrong.
Also some of the "natural" causes are suspect now, since they include things like permafrost thaw, which itself is caused by warming...
https://cleantechnica.com/2021/02/06/a-differential-equation...
This is because the methane is being converted to CO2 at a relatively quick clip.
The timescale for CO2 is larger-- centuries.
Actually, it's more than that. The 20x global warming potential of CH4 is based on a 100-year average, which is the yardstick unit of measurement in the scientific literature. But as you say, methane degrades in 20 years so its average-20x contribution happens within those 20 years:
> The IPCC reports that the global warming potential (GWP) for methane is about 84 in terms of its impact over a 20-year timeframe [..] and 105 times the effect when accounting for aerosol interactions
-- from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane?useskin=ti...
Indeed, this means most of the warming you get from emitting a molecule of CH4 is after it has decayed to the more stable CO2. Of course, sharp increases in methane are of concern for dynamic effects, from things like permafrost thaw.