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Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

Thats not how that works, just like the water cycle there is a carbon cycle.

You can’t produce “more” greenhouse gases in a closed system, the system will ebb and flow; until you dig up megatons of carbon that has been stored for a few hundred millennia and insert it into that system.

(same story with polar ice caps and the water cycle)

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The water cycle is actually the perfect analogy. The form of the water is almost as important as the amount. When you take all the water out of the ground and put it on the surface, and then a bunch evaporates, sure, we have the same amount of water. But we're still in big trouble because we don't have usable fresh water.

If you take a bunch of carbon in the grass and convert it to methane gas, sure you have the same amount, but it's a lot worse for the planet.

My current (and if I understood correctly: the current scientific) understanding of the carbon cycle does not indicate that methane is significantly more harmful than other forms of carbon release, mostly due to the fact that it does not have a significant lifetime in the atmosphere.

The issue remains, squarely, on adding to the carbon cycle. The harmful values of methane output is directly correlated with the oil based feed which GP mentions.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7725657/

https://meteor.geol.iastate.edu/gccourse/alumni/chem/carbon/...

Yea the methane thing has always seemed dubious, I looked into it more seriously years ago and came away with the same impression.

The water cycle is a great example because it is filtering the water as it goes, rapidly producing fresh water that rains on the land. Methane, likewise, is a short-lived byproduct of excess animal activity, and in a steady state sustainable mode, we have equality. The problem is the finger of oil on the scale, not the grass-raised beef, just like how excess bovines produce excess methane.

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