[xyzzyz]

Methane in atmosphere today is at 2 ppm, carbon dioxide is at 420 ppm. If methane is 20 times more potent, this implies that atmospheric methane is equivalent to 40 extra ppm of carbon dioxide.

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.

[tpnCC]

There is a detail missing in your Calculation.

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).

[xyzzyz]

> Global Warming Potential of Methane over a 20 year Time period is a bit more than 80 times that of CO2.

Where in the linked document it says that? Because I do not think it’s true.

[tpnCC]

2nd para beneath the side heading: "Are there alternatives to the 100-year GWP for comparing GHGs?"

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.

[myshpa]

> climate in 2023 is not significantly different than the climate in 2005

'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.

[freedomben]

> 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.

[myshpa]

(ChatGPT) There are several human sources of methane, including:

- 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.

[xyzzyz]

Yes, eating meat is essential to flourishing of overwhelming majority of humans. Most humans, as they become wealthier, increase their meat consumption. This is very consistent across the world. If you forced humans to stop eating meat, this would make billions of people very unhappy.

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.

[myshpa]

> If you forced humans to stop eating meat, this would make billions of people very unhappy.

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.

[xyzzyz]

> 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.

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.

[freedomben]

> 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.

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.

[myshpa]

> How exactly do you propose to heat the average person's home when all fossil fuels are no longer available

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?

[josephcsible]

> Atom & renewable sources. 256x256 km of solar panels is enough for whole world.

> 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?

[sbaiddn]

The Earth doesn't feel anything because it is not sentient. Anthropomorphizing topics causes us to treat them emotionally.

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)

[hkt]

If we're seeking to halt climate change, it seems quite reasonable to look at effective measures for that. If decreasing methane emissions from landfill or farming might contribute, it seems odd to write those things off. This is partly due to the way we silo investment in the west: there isn't an organisation that is a single point of coordination and can make the tradeoffs logically. So for better or worse, we should try to make those tradeoffs wherever we can.

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.

[sbaiddn]

We could slash emissions tomorrow by lowering the speed limit.

We aren't because we don't actually care.

[porkbeer]

Or not doing business with gross polluters like china that wouldnt be a rounding error like cars.

[myshpa]

I think that we'll have to do not one, two or three big changes, but maybe hundreds/thousands of small ones.

"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

[sbaiddn]

You wouldn't cite a random bloke on the internet, a person that has reason and consciousness, why are citing a language model that is trained on what the stupidest of blokes have said on the internet?

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.

[revelio]

Antarctic sea ice extent is currently at the same level it was at this time of year in 1980, actually a little higher. Use Charctic to see for yourself:

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...

[myshpa]

We have reliable measurements of Arctic snow cover that date back to the late 1960s when satellite observations of the Earth's surface began. The earliest satellite used for snow cover monitoring was the Television Infrared Observation Satellite (TIROS) series, which was launched by the United States in 1960.

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.

[lowkey]

As a point of order, chatgpt is not a citable source. It relies on underlying sources and you can ask chatgpt to identify it’s sources for a specific response in a follow up question.

[revelio]

AVHRR started collecting data in the early 1980s, not the early 70s. ChatGPT is hallucinating again. I guess this is the scenario AI ethics people feared - the internet being clogged up by AI generated misinformation. If you want to take part in this debate do you own research and cite actual data.

Polar bears are doing fine, by the way.

https://polarbearscience.com/2023/02/23/published-field-stud...

[myshpa]

It seems that AVHRR was launched in 1978 [0], with fairly continuous global coverage since June 1979 [1].

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...

[revelio]

From your wiki link:

"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.

[xyzzyz]

What an outstanding comment. You put much more effort in it than the person you replied to really deserved.

[revelio]

Thanks! :) Glad someone appreciated it.

[BlueTemplar]

Where did you get the idea that most of the methane is from natural processes ? (Same for people that seem to think that most of anthropogenic ones are from livestock?)

Also some of the "natural" causes are suspect now, since they include things like permafrost thaw, which itself is caused by warming...