Climate change feedbacks lead to surge in natural methane emissions
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"What if all the models are wrong," bleated the climate denier.
"Well, maybe they are," said the scientist, and the monkey's paw curls.
"Well, maybe they are," said the scientist, and the monkey's paw curls.
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Is there a readily available figure for how much more per molecule - naively, an increase of 1.9-0.7ppm *80 more impact makes the impact of the increase in methane equivalent to 96ppm of CO2?
Currently the increase in CO2 since pre industrial times is some 140ppm if I remember correctly, so given how short lived (relatively) atmospheric methane is, there's a huge incentive to reduce emissions :-(.
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I specifically remember bad faith morons telling me there were no such things as positive climate feedbacks only a couple of years ago.
What stage of denial are we at now? Is it "but China!?" Or "there's nothing we can do"? The latter of course ignores that we caused this in the first place.
I don't want to be, but I'm thoroughly in the despair phase.
What stage of denial are we at now? Is it "but China!?" Or "there's nothing we can do"? The latter of course ignores that we caused this in the first place.
I don't want to be, but I'm thoroughly in the despair phase.
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Yeah, it seems like most deniers have moved decisively into the "welp, guess there's nothing we can do, too bad!" stage. Which of course makes the "why didn't you eggheads warn us earlier that it was going to be this bad" stage imminent, and I swear to christ I'm gonna pick up an assault beef the first time I hear that in person, because I will slap the color out of their fucking hair.
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Oh hey, it's decades of feedback loops and extremely conservative IPCC estimates coming home to roost.
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Are we. . . are we now officially beginning the period of runaway climate change where global warming will cause more global warming, and there's no longer anything we can do to stop it? That like a forest fire, it will only stop when it burns itself out (that is to say, all the previously sequestered methane and other sources of carbon, have been released and there's just no more to add to the atmosphere)?
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Do you want the reassuringly optimistic answer or the answer that takes 2023 into account?
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Yeah we are firmly in Stage 5 of Climate Change Denial, "It's too late, there is nothing we can do so we might as well make the best of us it while we can and keep doing what we are doing"
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I suspect we began that a few decades ago - it's only now we're seeing the effects begin.
Climate articles are so depressing. We really are fucked.
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Drill, baby, drill, eh?
Applicable to all inconvenient science indiscriminately.
The "I do my own research something something evil globalist agenda/narrative/propaganda/<insert scary synonym of discourse here> something something Elon Musk is my lord and savior" oppositional defiant disorder phase.
Applicable to all inconvenient science indiscriminately.
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One ton of methane has the same greenhouse potential as ~30-35 tons of CO2; dunno how that gets converted to PPM, but 30x is a good estimate.
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I don't think it is clathrates. It seems the permafrost methane comes from water and heat being introduced to a formerly frozen soil and methanogenic microbes are starting to wake up and have a veritable feast.
From my knowledge, clathrates are more associated with marine sediments. And I think those are already starting to off gas in a few locations. But once the clathrates start breaking down and releasing methane, it will definitely make things worse than they already are. It's just a matter of time now by the looks of things.
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Yes, thanks for the actual answer rather than my half-assed averaged estimate
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I have posted what follows in some form or other more than once on this forum. I learned about AGW back in the early 80s. The trends we are seeing now were predicted decades ago, but weren't expected to be happening so quickly. How seriously did I take those predictions? When my wife wanted us to consider moving from the Great Lakes region to the southwest, I said I didn't want to move there because of the probability of increasing drought, water shortages and fires from climate change. I wanted to stay in the Great Lakes because access to fresh water would likely become a world wide problem due to climate change.
I'm still living in the Great Lakes region less than a mile from Lake Michigan. Now there are proposals floating around about sending water from the Great Lakes to the West. Fuck that proposal! Now methane is increasing in the atmosphere as predicted decades ago. Now the permafrost is not so permanent as predicted decades ago. Now the sea levels are rising due to the ice caps melting as predicted decads ago. Now wildfires, droughts and extreme precipitation and other extreme weather events are increasing as predicted decades ago.
The dominoes are beginning to fall. I'm not going to say it's too late to stop them from falling, but we sure as hell don't even have a decade to get our shit together.
I'm absolutely furious at every single God damn climate change denier who has actively obstructed action to prevent the predicted disasters unfolding across the world today. You all should be ashamed of yourselves and pray there isn't a hell.
One last item.
I told you so you AGW denying shits!
Apologies to the forum for this rant. Feel free to downvote.
I'm still living in the Great Lakes region less than a mile from Lake Michigan. Now there are proposals floating around about sending water from the Great Lakes to the West. Fuck that proposal! Now methane is increasing in the atmosphere as predicted decades ago. Now the permafrost is not so permanent as predicted decades ago. Now the sea levels are rising due to the ice caps melting as predicted decads ago. Now wildfires, droughts and extreme precipitation and other extreme weather events are increasing as predicted decades ago.
The dominoes are beginning to fall. I'm not going to say it's too late to stop them from falling, but we sure as hell don't even have a decade to get our shit together.
I'm absolutely furious at every single God damn climate change denier who has actively obstructed action to prevent the predicted disasters unfolding across the world today. You all should be ashamed of yourselves and pray there isn't a hell.
One last item.
I told you so you AGW denying shits!
Apologies to the forum for this rant. Feel free to downvote.
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Yeah, I would concur - this is largely emissions from gas productions and releases from permafrost and wetlands. Probably no clathrates. Yet.
But yeah, watch this space!
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The really depressing thing is, I and I'm sure most of you saw 20 years ago that the BS narritive 'cycle' if you will was going to be, and it appears it's coming true:
* [In early days, when there was scientific evidence, but not real clear effects yet, of global warming]: "Global warming is a hoax by Big Science chasing research dollars from liberal marxists who want an excuse to radically remake the economy and centralize government control. FREEEDOOOOOM!!!"
* [Once effects started to become more apparent even to the general public]: "That's not climate change. Climate change is a hoax. That's just weather! There have always been hurricanes, tornadoes, forest fires, droughts, floods. These dumb liberal marxists think we can control the weather!"
* [As effects become even more apparent]: Climate has always been changing - How do you explain the Ice Age, huh, huh? , and oil and coal and industrial chemicals have nothing to do with it. Volcanoes! Sun cycles!"
* [Finally, as climate change becomes ever more undeniable and obvious]: "Whelp, it's too late now. No point doing anything about climate change, because we can't control it! What's done is done! What we need is to drill, baby, drill, and make coal great again, so we have the energy we need for air conditioning, and rebuilding all the homes that will be destroyed by climate change, and building sea walls, giant water pumps, canals, pipes, and other massive infrastructure to mitigate climate change."
Meanwhile, there's no consequences for all the people that caused this in the first place, with their denialism and refusal to invest their fortunes into evolving our industries and economies. They could have made money off green energy, but dug in their heels and insisted on making ever more and more money off fossil fuels.
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I was making reference to a popular theory of natural methane runaway, not saying that was specifically what was occurring here.
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I don't like being Chicken Little, screaming, "The Ice is thawing! The ice is thawing!" all the time. It's tiring. And no one wants to hear it.
So, I'll keep it short. It's nice to see that the climate scientists are FINALLY saying things like that. I get why this apparent lag in understanding is there. Scientists need proof and facts and evidence to make definitive statements about the present, and project that into the future. Those would be the "realistic expectations of science". If the climate change models are inaccurate, it's because of the previous lack evidence to reveal the true scope of the issue.
They're getting the evidence to reveal that scope I've been beating to death for years based on my own fucked-up idiot-savant pattern recognition talent that caused me no end of personal hassle back in my military service days.
I expect these kinds of statements will be coming much more often. It's very clear that the climate is changing far faster than anyone was willing to admit. That they're admitting it now is, if nothing else, personally validating, but hugely disappointing due to the time we wasted on band-aids for environmental sucking chest wounds. I just hope the time lag between these realizations, and what I hope will be a much more effective response, isn't what kills us.
But given that even in an emergency, and in the face of immanent peril, people will people, I'm pretty sure it will be a contributing factor to our mutual future demise.
And I'd love to be proven wrong about that, too.
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I feel like some detail is missing to explain why this is a problem. Water blocking UV is, precisely, how hydroxyl radicals are created by UV. What’s the problem? Is it that we’d prefer the hydroxyl be created closer to the surface?
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ubercurmudgeon
Ars Tribunus Militum
Permafrost is mostly found in Russia, Canada and the Nordic countries, so to some people, who can only see things in nationalistic terms, this is just another excuse to blame foreigners.
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They claimed that feedbacks were necessarily runaway processes with no limit, so there were no feedbacks because the climate doesn’t run away without limit. Which… wasn’t ever the definition used in climate science. Or anywhere else, for that matter.
They also claimed there were negative feedbacks being ignored, and as proof of that they’d bring out papers by climate scientists about negative feedbacks. When doing so though, they’d use the climate science sense of a feedback process, because intellectual honesty is for the rubes.
Anyway, they have always claimed “but China” at the same time as they claim that CO2 is plant food, that it isn’t a problem, also there’s nothing we can do, and why didn’t anyone warn them, all at once.
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The basic reason that methane is a worse greenhouse gas is that warming depends on how much relative increase you’ve achieved in the concentration of the gas. Double the concentration and you've increased the temperature by 4C for CO2, and it’s not all that different for methane.
However, there’s around 400ppm of CO2 versus just 2ppm of methane. Add 1ppm of CO2 and you’ve achieved a small percentage increase, therefore a small amount of warming. Add 1ppm of methane and you’ve increased 50% increase, and thus a lot of warming.
The saving grace of methane is that is doesn’t last long; when it oxidizes, it becomes CO2. So over time, your 1ppm increase in methane becomes a 1ppm increase in CO2 instead. Accounting for that to get to a single figure is … a question of accounting choices.
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Alaska is still part of the U.S. last I checked, despite Russian propagandists’ wishes.
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As someone who's been in the field for a little minute, it's not that it's a new realization. Everyone knew this was a possibility. It's just that it's hard to back up dark horse predictions with statistics and data, and we're already dismissed as alarmists and Chicken Littles. So you stick to the most conservative (in terms of risk) projection, you stick to the model outputs you can most solidly defend, statistically.
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This will solve climate change but will never happen: https://www.genolve.com/design/socialmedia/memes/Climate-International-Treaty-Organization
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The Gish gallop always reminds me of a fighter jet evading a heat-seeking missile, pumping out a rooster tail of flares. It doesn't matter which flare deflects the missile, it's just spray and pray.
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Well, Canada's fossil fuel industry sure is to blame for lots of things. "Ethical oil" my ass.
PS: I'm Canadian.
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I live in Alabama. I hear things like 'Well I won't be alive when it happens, so why should I do anything about it?'
or
'The earth goes through cycles. We're in a cycle'. or 'Humans are too small to have an impact on the planet.'
My hand would be so sore for from all the slapping.
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Welcome, I've been here for years. There's a jukebox in the corner, but as one last sick joke it only has the song "Ice Ice Baby".
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Don't forget warnings being too urgent so they couldn't be taken seriously.
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The club I'm stuck in has 2 songs on it's jukebox, both by the Talking Heads, "Burning Down the House", "Road to Nowhere". Kinda appropriate given I've been worried about this issue since those songs came out.
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Here in the Midwest we have the scourge of corn sweat to deal with.
I'm hoping science can come up with an antiperspirant for corn.
I'm hoping science can come up with an antiperspirant for corn.
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One important thing to keep in mind, is that this relative potency ratio depends heavily upon the residency time (or half-life) of each greenhouse gas in the atmosphere.
If, as hypothesized in the article above, methane actually will tend to endure longer than previously expected in the atmosphere (due to increased absolute humidity, driven by warming), then the relative potency of methane vs. CO2 would be correspondingly higher than even a factor of 80 over 20 years.
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Climate denier: wait a minute, no.
In same portal there is article how LLM nonsense hallucinates Doom and how it is great.
I know we are in shit. Can we stop pretending now it is just imaginary circus and we can waste resources and money on this bullshit?
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1. Liked the NASA video about sources of methane. Noticed that it did not mention the US.
2. Pretty sure most folks don't really understand the term "tipping point" and hear it as "well, things might get worse from here." I've had some success by explaining it this way: You can roll a rock back and forth, but it pretty much stays put. However, once it starts rolling down the hill, it won't spontaneously return and bringing it back up may not be possible.
2. Pretty sure most folks don't really understand the term "tipping point" and hear it as "well, things might get worse from here." I've had some success by explaining it this way: You can roll a rock back and forth, but it pretty much stays put. However, once it starts rolling down the hill, it won't spontaneously return and bringing it back up may not be possible.
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We now have solid evidence of nitrous oxide emission in the Arctic. If CO2 has a 1 affect on GW and methane has a 10 affect nitrous oxide has 300, for round about 100 years.
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General public, aka my relatives, are in "it is just Earth, humans are not capable of anything" mode (I detect apathy, and do not press futher. They know things are horrible. They don't know what to do). Also, to be fair, I don't blame them. Their brains have been incredibly massaged over this for last three decades. It is surprising that denial is minority.
As for trolls, remember, they don't care. They just want a controversy, clicks, or attract right leaning people to their causes or money scam schemes. For them it is ALWAYS been moving goal posts.
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