this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2023
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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world. About 1C of total warming. Second chart: about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability. Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases. About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

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The climate threat of methane gas expansion is growing, and the public remains largely unaware — in part because of misinformation and misleading terminology. (heated.world)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

One issue may be that there are a wide range of numbers for the relative warming potential of CH~4~ (methane), compared to CO~2~. Main reason is that this depends on the time horizon you care about - the shorter it is, the more methane counts. So it's not such a big deal for long-term sea-level rise, as for earlier impacts such as ecosystems.
Moreover the relative warming potential CH~4~/CO~2~ inevitably changes over time, not because the science changes much, but as the atmosphere changes. The lifetime of methane in the atmosphere increases as its concentration rises, since it's removed mainly by OH radicals of which there is a limited supply. While the warming effect of each new ton of CO2 decreases as its concentration rises, due to saturation of its absorption band in the infrared spectrum. Consequently, the ratio of these two keeps changing. In general, methane is getting relatively more important, not less.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

So long as people are extracting and burning, it's a problem, irrespective of whether you're thinking about the direct impact that methane leaks have, or whether you're talking about the CO2 that results from burning the methane. It all needs to stay in the ground.