From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-60203683
The BBC article on methane makes an interesting claim:
An IPCC study last year suggested that 30-50% of the current rise in temperatures is down to methane.
The study referred to is AR6, which estimates that increased levels of methane in the atmosphere have contributed 0.5C to global warming since 1850-1900:
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/
Given that even IPCC reports have accepted that some of the warming since the 19thC has been naturally caused, that does not leave much which can be due to CO2.
Even without taking those natural factors into account, net of aerosols only about 0.6C of warming is man-made, once methane is excluded from the equation:
It therefore seems that CO2 is a vanishingly small problem.
Methane, which is 84 times as powerful as a GHG per unit than CO2, has an extremely short life span, declining in the atmosphere by half every decade.
Consequently we don’t have to start drastically reducing emissions now. Merely maintaining current emissions will mean that atmospheric concentrations will level off quickly:
Indeed, if the current push to cut methane emissions is successful, we would likely see rapid global cooling, assuming of course the IPCC calculations are right.
Given the reactions of the world’s leaders and scientists in the 1970s following three decades of global cooling, that might not turn out to be such a clever idea at all!
FOOTNOTE
I should point out that some scientists believe that methane is virtually irrelevant as a GHG, because its emissions spectrum is already fully filled by water vapour.
See here.
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Well, I guess the above article means that the IPCC is finally admitting that science just cannot support the meme that CO2 is the predominate driver of global warming and the more CO2 added to the atmosphere, the hotter it will get.
As Wijngaarden & Happer [2020] showed in Dependence of Earth’s Thermal Radiation on Five Most Abundant Greenhouse Gases, CO2 is basically saturated in terms of ability to increase GHG capture of LWIR from Earth’s surface.
So, the IPCC is floating the trial balloon to declare methane to now be the predominant GHG that needs to be controlled/eliminated. Watch as this narrative further evolves over the next five years or so.
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all to them imaginary.” — H.L. Mencken
My apologies, with a typo I slightly botched the Mencken quote in its last phrase. Here it is in correct form:
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
I don’t see any difference in the two quotations, Gordon.
Dave,
Check the third to last word of the quote.
If they admit CO2 isn’t a problem then the battle is over as we will never emit enough methane to make a difference even if we believe the Scientology
If they admit CO2 isn’t a problem then the battle is over as we will never emit enough methane to make a difference even if we believe the Scientology, in fact we save the world by gathering methane and burning it.
Gee, if methane is playing in the same league as CO2 – the answer is simple. Burn it. It’ll turn into H2O and CO2, and we won’t be any worse off. Besides, we’ll get the energy we might otherwise need coal to provide.
In concentrations of 0-5% Methane in air, the mixture is too lean to ignite or burn.
5% by volume concentration is equivalent to 50,000 ppmv. 5% by mass concentration is equivalent to about 90,000 ppmv. Hence, there is quite a ways to go to be able to ignite and burn the current 1.8 ppm mole fraction (= 1.8 ppmv).
Seriously, this CANNOT be true. The science is settled – we keep being told that the science is settled, so I officially (yes, officially) declare this untrue.
SimonJ (you don’t really need a ‘sarc’ tag, do you?)
The new narrative. Bill Gates, Vanguard, Blackrock and co. want to sell us synthetic lab meat. Time to buy stock of firms that synthesize meat flavors …
Highly processed foods which are very bad for your body and (for the Greenies) emit more GHG’s than the meat they are trying to replace.
Plant based meat substitute = the unhealthy option.
Yes, I keep pointing out that the process to try and make vegetables look and taste like meat results in highly processed junk food.
The potato chips I like are potatoes, canola oil and salt, and supposedly those are bad for me, but Beyond Meat with a list of ingredients I need a chemistry degree to decipher is healthy?
This whole beyond meat industry reminds me of the Seinfeld episode with the bit on lesbians using male shaped sex aides, when you join the other team you should have to give up the equipment.
Seems increasingly pathetic and needy for people to have vegetarian options to pretend they are still eating meat.
I think that analogy falls down a bit – lesbians don’t like what the equipment is naturally attached to, not the equipment itself.
But I wholeheartedly agree with your final conclusion – it’s a pretense of vegetarianism.
“Time to buy stock of firms that synthesize meat flavors”. What a shame, I have no spare cash to put into that, my cash is all in coal companies. Maybe when my coal shares stop going up I’ll switch ….. or maybe not.
My neighbor synthesizes meat flavors from grass and grain. He also manages to get the exact same texture and nutritional value.
My neighbor smokes salmon – I’d like to see that done with grass and grain!
Speaking of water vapor, it isn’t even shown in the AR6 graphic about GHGs!
And 30–50% of zero is?
So, we need more methane, too? Okely dokely, we will get right on that!
Chi’drens? 30-50% of nothing is still nothing. Did they show the images for volcanic eruptions? I bet not. The one that just popped in Tonga most likely put more methane into the atmosphere than human industry has ever even produced.
“The one that just popped in Tonga most likely put more methane into the atmosphere than human industry has ever even produced.”
No it didn’t. If you think I’m wrong let’s have a reference otherwise more lies from the chief liar. Here’s my reference and while it doesn’t mention methane specifically it says
“Greenhouse gas emissions from volcanoes comprise less than one percent of those generated by today’s human endeavors.”
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/earthtalks-volcanoes-or-humans/
Methane is a greenhouse gas. So the possibility that the one Tongan volcano “put more methane into the atmosphere than human industry has ever even produced” is about as ludicrous as a comment could be. Well done you win this year’s “pants on fire” award…. Come to think of it, didn’t you win it last year with your Ford Lightning comment?
You really just can’t get over being such a simple-minded child. Thats cute. Mommy left her computer on again, didn’t she?
Yep that’s about the level of intellectual integrity I thought you would come back with.
Poor widdle simple, it gonna cry now? Should I call the waaambulance for you, sweety?
Some little calculators cannot handle uuuuge numbers like 1890 parts per billion.
Doubling uuuge numbers like 1890 PPB CH4 can have no measurable climate effect, and that is not roundoff!
Indeed it is. The current concentration is about 1890 PPB, or about 1.89 PPM, compared to 420 PPM for CO2. Allowing for the the claimed 85X greater capacity for forcing than CO2, the CH4 would be equivalent to about 161 PPM CO2 in forcing potential. Or, about 28% of the CO2-equivalent forcing. For the longer term forcing of about 32X, the methane would account for about 13%.
Half of nothing is still nothing.
Will beans be banned?
Save beans – kill the termites!
Houses world over agree.
One of the aspects of methane in greenhouse warming is that there is a fairly clear feedback loop via, methane seeps through permafrost. The permafrost areas are somewhat of a barrier to fossil methane as well as methane released from decaying organics bound up in the permafrost, at least that is the concern. The impact of warming on atmospheric CO2 is not so obvious, although we know from ice core data that a rising temperature leads the CO2 up. However, how that occurs is less clear, at least to me anyway. But, back to the methane. My thought is that any perturbation in the earth’s heat balance that triggers increasing permafrost methane could snowball into further warming. The question is, why hasn’t this already happened? I think this is one of the major weaknesses in tipping point arguments; anything can trigger a feedback loop, if they are sitting there waiting to be triggered. It doesn’t have to be manmade.
I always considered the link between temperature and CO2 to be due to plant growth. Increased temperature (especially in the equatorial and tropical areas) leads to increased plant growth which, in turn, leads to more CO2 being emitted by plants. The greening of the planet has an obvious natural effect on CO2 levels which also leads to increased plant growth and so on.
Seems like plants would be a net transfer of CO2 from air to soil. That’s how we got coal.
Coal required rapid burial of abundant plant material in anoxic conditions. Most coal developed before a fungus that breaks down lignin evolved. Today, Some brown coal and lignite is developing, but the amount is nothing like during the Carboniferous. Orogeny is necessary to drive off the water and other volatiles to increase the energy density found in bituminous and anthracite grade coals.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/06/120628181721.htm
This is a situation where “The present is [not] the key to the past.”
Was what looks like a singular down-vote based on my popularity with you, or was there something I wrote that you disagree with, but were too lazy to contest?
On net, plants absorb CO2, they don’t emit it.
Plants are net zero wrt carbon. A plant absorbs C while growing, but releases it all after dying. Even if a plant is eaten, its C eventually gets released again. Planting more plants only takes up more C once.
However, we are concerned about the fast Carbon Cycle, which means months to years, not hundreds of years.
Trees not only respire CO2 at night, but do so also in the Winter. That means that net, trees sequester CO2 during the growing season, but source it when they are dormant. Eventually, fungi and bacteria (and fires) recover almost all the carbon and put it back into the atmosphere.
It has been far warmer than today in the past 8000 years, with the arctic tree line hundreds of km farther north than today meaning the tundra has thawed many times before
And no catastrophic runaway warming ever
You keep trying to defend the narrative through the back door
Still wondering at your game?
I should be clear to the careful reader that I was pointing out the weakness of the tipping point argument, especially via permafrost methane. I was not defending anything.
I have noticed several posts claiming that the CH4 band is already saturated, so more or less CH4 does not matter. I have not studied that and have no opinion on it, but the premise of what this post was presenting was about more CH4 being a problem; if that be the case, then why hasn’t the problem already occurred sometime in the past?
Premising feedbacks ‘sitting there waiting to be triggered’ out of thin air, sorry CH4, seems careless, to this careful reader. Even trigger-happy!
Doubling both CO2 and CH4 whether by oceans, engin’s, or anythin’ , can have no measurable effect, whether you have an opinion or not on saturation.
The claim is that warming will cause permafrost to emit more methane. Actual scientists using actual instruments have measured actual permafrost and found this not to be the case.
Bacteria in the soil also get more active as temperature increases, and these bacteria eat the methane before it can make it to the atmosphere.
The source of the CO2 that gets emitted as the world warms is also well known. It comes from the warming oceans.
The scientific method should be applied:
Hypothesis: CO2 & Methane cause the climate to change by warming.
Data: Co2 & Methane have increased and the climate has not warmed.
Conclusion: The hypothesis needs to be changed.
No, they will follow Newton – Hypotheses non Fingo – I make no hypothesis. The science is settled!
The predominant source of “man-made” methane emissions comes from the practice of raising farm animals, mainly cattle, for food (via food digestion and manure decay) and the cultivation of rice paddies.
The predominate source of naturally-occurring methane emissions arises from organic decay occurring in natural wetlands.
So, the “obvious answers” to minimizing releasing methane, that dastardly greenhouse gas, into Earth’s atmosphere is to eliminate (a) raising of cattle as human food, (b) elimination of rice as a food source, and (c) elimination of natural wetlands from Earth’s surface.
Yeah, sure, let’s get on this right away . . . idiots!
Reply to Gordon Dressler.
Look at this paper by Paul Homewood where he has posted a graph titled Global Methane Emissions.
A steady climb until 2008 and then a flat line till 2018 .What was the problem with farmed livestock over those 10 years .
There was NO problem .
Not one atom of additional carbon or molecule of CO2 is added to the atmosphere by farmed livestock ,the process is a CYCLE.
I am speculating that the steady rise was caused by natural gas venting from oil wells and then later natural gas leaks in pipe lines and pumping stations .
I have been told by oil and gas engineers that the venting and the gas leaks were mostly remedied during the first years of this century .
So what caused methane emissions to rise from 2009?
Coal.
World coal production was steady over those 10 years at 4.7 billion tonnes.
From 2009 coal production ramped up mainly for Asian consumption to peak at 8.2 billion tonnes in 2018.
A lot of methane is released during mining and transport with more being released during combustion .
I have nothing against coal but I have to defend live stock farmers as I have been a dairy and beef farmer all of my life .
I understand methane escapes during mining & transport but I don’t understand the “during combustion”. If methane is in the coal, burning coal burns the methane (what was still contained) then it’s no longer methane.
Leaving methane in the ground to naturally escape to be 30 or 84x worse GHG than CO2 seems worse than mining methane to be burned into a weaker GHG [CO2].
We’re doomed guys.. even the trees have got it in for us!
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/trees-release-methane-what-it-means-climate-change
“At the global scale this could be huge”
“The emissions from an individual tree are small,” Covey said. “But there are several trillion trees. At the global scale this could be huge.”
Some math skills and logic may be wanting. If half is from human derived methane (the map seems to exclude any natural sources or fossil fuel sources such as agriculture), and most of the rest from CO2 then there is almost nothing left for the most important greenhouse gas water vapour, which in their models is supposed to cause about 2/3 of the anthropogenic warming due to feedbacks. There is also no room for solar activity, cloud cover, cosmic ray cloud nucleation, natural ocean/atmosphere cycles, and many other potential influences not yet understood. This is a fairy tail, not a scientific argument. And the tellers are snake olio salesmen, not scientists.
They’re also paid very well
Methane keeps us warm and cooks our food
They can jog on
Incredible new ‘models’ suggest methane is naughtier than the dreaded CO2 , how much more will cost civilisation with their new remedies except China of course .
50% of bugger-all is still bugger-all. Apparently the Warmistas have the only computers that don’t give a divide by zero error.
Recently I downloaded and am reading Wijngaarden and Happer ” Dependence of Earth’s Thermal Radiation on Five Most
Abundant Greenhouse Gases” It is a right riveting read. Based on quantum mechanical treatment of greenhouse gases and concludes that methane and CO2 are trivial contributers at current concentrations. As a physics graduate 50 years ago , my quantum Mechanics photon capture cross section and other elementary concepts are somewhat rusty. However these guys do seem to have got their act together.
Now to give balance to my research and hopefully to demonstrate that the emperor has no clothes, I need something from the other side. I am fine with Tyndall and Arrhenius in 1896 for a qualitative treatment but of course that predates quantum mechanical treatment of molecular Infra Red absorption and re-emission.
Searching through the web, albeit cursarily, I can find Trenberth’s pictures in IPCC reports and any amount of guff about
“Scientists say that . . . . ..”
Surely to god the alarmist brigade somewhere among their 97% consensus must have the moral authority of some peer reviewed proper Physics papers setting out their quantitative assessment of greenhouse gas effect.
I would be obliged if any reader could quote could send me any such bibliography material (Peer reviewed of course for what that’s worth) that you may have to hand.
Time to step up to the plate Griff, Lloydo et al
My model predicts silence.
My money is on Pat.
Is it not odd that the problem Planck solved was an infamous UV runaway, a major disaster for the pre-quantum era?
Dr. Happer refers to Planck and Schwarzschild. Arrhenius and Tyndall belong in the pre-quantum era.
Then along came Einstein :
The Quantum Theory of Radiation A. Einstein (Received March, 1917)
https://inspirehep.net/files/9e9ac9d1e25878322fe8876fdc8aa08d
See how Einstein links the Maxwell gas velocity distribution to the quantum,
and Einsteins concluding remark on momentum and thermodynamics.
It sure looks like the oligarchy never forgave Planck, Schwarzschild, Einstein and invent some runaway disaster again! They want to Great Reset back before 1900!
I know that idiots like Al Gore say that the “Science” was settled by Arrhenius” but you and I both make the point that we are discussing quantum phenomena. However I am interested in addressing whence the AGW crowd derived their authority and which papers laid the groundwork for IPCC shenanigans and shonky models. Armed with this bibliography I can then
n systematically refute (or otherwise) their theoretical basis
Here’s a really wild card for you…..
Extra Methane increases Global Greening
How. Why.
Plants are smelly things, because they release Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs)
Why do they do that? It took a lot of resource to make those chemicals so what is the point of just letting them float away in the wind?
Because: Ozone
Ozone is truly desperate and destructive stuff, especially for plants.
Is that a reason for them making the VOCs – to soak up low-level ## atmospheric Ozone before it hurts them? VOCs are very flammable substances and Ozone is an incredibly potent oxidiser – it makes perfect sense.
But how do plants know and when to release VOCs, surely they must have some sort of sensing system?
## Wherever there is Ultra Violet light and Oxygen, there is Ozone.
That’s where it comes from, especially way up aheight in the stratosphere = something that warmists and catastrophists alike ‘keep under their hats‘. It rather derails their CFC narrative.
Enter Methane (CH4)
CH4 is a VOC and, as many commentators have commentated, CH4 has a short life when it’s in the atmosphere.
Obviously question, where does it go?
Answer, Ozone eats it
Extra methane in the atmosphere close to the ground equates to lowered Ozone levels close to the ground = the place where plants are to be found.
The plants will be sensitive to that and thus reduce their production and release of VOCs
If that is the case, plants thus have extra resource available for the basic business of growing and being green. resource that they otherwise gave away for no return apart from, ozone defence
Thus = Global Greening.
Also from the Ozone shield that CH4 provides = less damage from whatever Ozone still does get to them.
Escaped gasoline, petrol, kerosene, nail polish remover etc etc would also work in plants’ favour also.
PS Is there possibly an explanation of why large city centres are now plagued by ground-level ozone.
All cars and trucks now have much more fuel-tight engines plus of course catalysers to burn off escaping fuel – fuel that would have self destructed itself and ozone had they met.
Unintended Consequences, fun aren’t they?
.
More precisely, it gets converted to CO2 and H20 by oxidation.
Note the tiny contribution by aviation contrails to the right. AR6 claims a 0.06W/m2 forcing by 2019. Interestingly that does not include feedbacks, which are however included in the CO2 and Methane figures.
More importantly, total cirrus cloud (CC) forcing is said to be a net 5W/m2. The contrail contribution to CC would thus be tiny, only about 1%. Contrails, so the IPCC, would hardly increase CC at all.
With recent lock downs affecting air traffic, we have a lot more data on the subject. And they confirm what Travis et al (2002), a strong increase in DTR (daily temperature range) after 9/11 of 1.8K. Thereby implying that contrails make up for a large share in CC.
Despite there was no complete shut down of air traffic, CC reductions fall into the 30% range.
https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/21/14573/2021/
This is massive and hints towards contrails being the main driver of AGW.
“An IPCC study last year suggested that 30-50% of the current rise in temperatures is down to methane.”
Here are the big tells:
a) CO2 is disappointing climateers big time. First, their models proved to be running 200-300% too hot compared to measured T anomalies a decade ago, even though they had maxed out upward adjustments to temperatures. Why they thought themselves ‘saved’ by the 2015 el Niño shows they were living on the fumes of hope. Gavin Schmidt finally had to come out and say “models are running away too hot and we don’t know why”.
b) the EU in their self inflicted energy woes are now giving gas and nuclear “sustainability” accreditation.
Its easy! The models are wrong. One can start with the cloud parameterizations.
Schmidt’s admission and the “discovery” of methane as a problem is a tacit admission that the models are all wrong and so are the scientists in the 97% that agree with the models.
This is very good news. Now all we have to do is let the land developers fill in the wetlands and build condos. Bingo less methane emissions from one of the biggest sources. /s
Well, if methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, and is also a very effective source of energy – released by combustion that converts methane to CO2 – it looks like the “green” thing to do would be to get all or much more of our energy from methane.
A couple of weeks ago, there was an interesting paper discussed
here on the relative amounts of anthropogenic and natural CO2 in the
atmosphere, as determined by the dilution of 14C from the exchange
reservoirs (such as plants and oceans) by CO2 from fossil fuels, which no longer contain 14C, see https://tinyurl.com/47ubjspy .The original paper is here https://tinyurl.com/mr4y9uwf
The authors concluded “We determined that in 2018, atmospheric anthropogenic fossil CO2 represented 23% of the total emissions since 1750 with the remaining 77% in the exchange reservoirs. Our results show that the percentage of the total CO2 due to the use of fossil fuels from 1750 to 2018 increased from 0% in 1750 to 12% in 2018, much too low to be the cause of global warming”.
Methane from oil or gas wells is a fossil fuel and will contain
no 14C, so the methane that leaks from those wells comes within the purview of the paper above. It means that leaking methane is nothing to be
worried about, regardless of its being 84 times more effective as a
greenhouse gas than CO2, and adds further confirmation to what has been said here.