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Comment by lebuffon | Hacker News Reader

I just heard about a jump in atmospheric methane that is not understood. The oil/gas industry has made some progress to curtail methane emissions so we don't think it is that gang.

I wonder about millions of tons of frozen ancient vegetation in Canada and Russia beginning to rot. ?

One idea is that we have hit the true "terminus" point of the past ice age and temperatures will rise rapidly over the next few decades and then stabilize at the new "normal".

Human CO2 might have pushed temps up but this could be much bigger than we expected.

https://theconversation.com/rising-methane-could-be-a-sign-t...

https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends_ch4/

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> The oil/gas industry has made some progress to curtail methane emissions so we don't think it is that gang.

I don't know if we can reach that conclusion. It's been discovered, in Canada at least, that O&G is vastly under-reporting its methane production. I imagine other areas of the world might be even worse.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/climate-and-environment/30-40-per-cen...

But they conducted extensive reviews on everything they do and concluded that we should look elsewhere. Maybe methane grows on trees or everyone just had more gas recently

Oil, sorry energy, companies would never ever lie

Uzbekistan and Nigeria are pretty bad on methane emissions and the Nordstream attack also released quite a lot.

War is highly destructive environmentally and uses a lot of fuel, so this Ukraine war is not helping.

Global methane emissions are estimated at 570 million tons annually.

Nordstream explosion is thought to have produced 155 thousand tons at the high end.

~.0004% bump.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_methane_emissions

Methane stored in arctic and Siberia is equivalent to 100 of years of todays yearly co2 emissions. Once that starts coming out there’s no point of return for sure.

But the recent increase is probably due to wetlands for now.

>no point of return

Considering we're talking about an event that happens every ~140k years by definition there will be "a return". Just like there will be future ice ages.

More accurately no return in our lifetimes.

That can be read in two ways. Too long or no survivors of the process.

Can't it be both? ;~)

>> No one knows the amount of thought I put into this same problem when building train tracks for my son but I had no idea how to solve the problem.

My opinion is that it will rise until we reach a tipping point where changes happen that will lead to the next glaciation. IMHO there will be at least a few years where odd things happen and then the modeling folks will say "oh crap this is going to happen". Stalling of the north Atlantic current is just one of these things that might happen.

In this light, I don't consider human-induced warming a fundamentally new problem, but an acceleration of a process that has been happening for several million years. Not that it makes too much difference - I don't want a glacier in my back yard any more than I want the other outcomes people talk about ;-)

> but an acceleration of a process that has been happening for several million years

That's exactly the main issue, isn't it? A change happening over millenia/millions of years gives enough time and slack for life to adapt, an accelerated change that happens in the course of centuries will just erase many species that can't reconfigure their metabolism through evolution. Of course that life finds a way and new species adapted to a new environment will become more prevalent over time, the issue is exactly that we accelerated it to a pace where most things aren't able to cope. We depend on those things as well to survive.

Changing the speed of a process can dramatically change the outcome. For instance, compare taking an elevator vs jumping out the window.

Is this a bug or mistake,? Quoted content is from another thread I saw on here about tension in duplo train tracks

Blowing up Nord Stream in the spring probably wasn’t a good idea for the environment.

But hey at least we’re sticking it to the fascist Russians. /s

Having it operational and delivering gas for decades to come would have been worse for the environment. Germany is still a bit tumbling but definitely will move from gas and oil to other means of heating.

Yeah, they're doing well at moving to coal.

Stop spreading FUD.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany

That Wikipedia stat is over 3 years ago 2020. What’s it look like now?

The immediate environmental impact of a destructive act can be catastrophic, endangering ecosystems and human lives. While the long-term use of fossil fuels is indeed concerning, abrupt disruption isn't the answer. Instead, we should be pushing for a gradual, sustainable transition to cleaner energy sources. It's about finding a balance without resorting to extreme measures.

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