Don't worry, this is a pure climate alarmist. You can tell by this quote and others:
"But no matter how well-informed you are, you are surely not alarmed enough."
This person is literally saying we need to be alarmed.
I really didn't understand the part where they said methane has 34 times the greenhouse effect as carbon over a period of time and then changes the timeframe to bring the multiplier put to 84 times. To me it felt a lot like when congress talks about deficits over a decade - well actually they talk about reductions over a decade so it's times 10 and increases are just annual. Anyway, there is a difference between methane and CO2 but to try to make it sound worse by talking about time is just another alarmist tactic.
Regardless of your stance, this article is intended to be alarmist and even says so. IMHO it is not worthy of HN.
>> This person is literally saying we need to be alarmed.
And why shouldn't we (he) be doing that? Actually the author's goal is transparent, to shake up perception, to provide fodder in the imagination of folks to ultimately change how urgently we treat this in public forums. I thought this was a quite trenchant point (from the article):
>>Over the past decades, our culture has gone apocalyptic with zombie movies and Mad Max dystopias, perhaps the collective result of displaced climate anxiety, and yet when it comes to contemplating real-world warming dangers, we suffer from an incredible failure of imagination. The reasons for that are many: the timid language of scientific probabilities, which the climatologist James Hansen once called “scientific reticence” in a paper chastising scientists for editing their own observations so conscientiously that they failed to communicate how dire the threat really was; the fact that the country is dominated by a group of technocrats who believe any problem can be solved and an opposing culture that doesn’t even see warming as a problem worth addressing;
Back to you:
>>I really didn't understand the part where they said methane has 34 times the greenhouse effect as carbon over a period of time and then changes the timeframe to bring the multiplier put to 84 times.
I also thought this statement was scientifically unclear, but I think the author was trying to say that the rate of methane release increases, thus, the impact on climate systems multiplies relative to an equivalent release of CO2 in that period (100 yrs v 24 yrs). If someone else can mention exactly how he got from 34x to 84x though, id love to hear it; i didn't get it..
I do want to mention, however the 30x GHG effect number is not set in stone. In fact, depending on the rate of release, there may be 'force multipliers' depending on how (quickly) ecosystems can absorb and use these gases. Ominously, this multiplier seems to go up anyways as temps rise. [1]
Methane deteriorates in the upper atmosphere fairly quickly, whereas CO2 sticks around. Methane is a dramatically better insulator than CO2, so in the short run its impact is higher, but when you stretch out the timescale, your methane is deteriorating while the CO2 sticks around, so the relative impact tilts slowly toward CO2.
While you are right that methane wont naturally stick around for ever, and that it breaks down sooner than CO2. After googling around a little, I finally managed to find the source of the author's two numbers, and in the end I am more troubled than ever :/
>>At issue is the global warming potential (GWP), a number that allows experts to compare methane with its better-known cousin, carbon dioxide. While CO2 persists in the atmosphere for centuries, or even millennia, methane warms the planet on steroids for a decade or two before decaying to CO2. In those short decades, methane warms the planet by 86 times as much as CO2, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But policymakers typically ignore methane's warming potential over 20 years (GWP20) when assembling a nation's emissions inventory. Instead, they stretch out methane's warming impacts over a century, which makes the gas appear more benign than it is, experts said. The 100-year warming potential (GWP100) of methane is 34, according to the IPCC.[1]
Doesn't 'reducing' (really, normalizing) the GWP for the
~80 yrs of the 100yr period (when it is not existing) seem sort of like an accounting trick? In other words, if 20GT of CH4 were released next year from the Bering Sea into the atmosphere (this would be spectacularly bad), the overall shock to the climate/atmosphere systems is precisely the same.
Sensationalism is not a firm basis for serious debate or serious action. If anything is going to save the human race, it is technology, but to hear these breathless alarmists talk, they are anti-technology, anti-progress, and apparently want us all to live stacked up in massive cities with no real quality of life at all. I tend to see this as either an exhibition of control-freak tendencies or simply full-on communism. Either way, it sucks.
>>to hear these breathless alarmists talk, they are anti-technology, anti-progress, and apparently want us all to live stacked up in massive cities with no real quality of life at all. I tend to see this as either an exhibition of control-freak tendencies or simply full-on communism.
Where is the second half of the article where, after discussing at length many bad possible outcomes, the guy goes on to propose detailed social engineering schemes to solve the looming planetary crisis??
Either you did not read this article closely, or you are simply trolling. In my opinion, the real ending of the piece was marvelously open-ended. The author concludes by highlighting the irrational , but quintessential human, tendency to see some bright-side to the whole thing-- here are our climate scientists like Hansen and others, that know the most and see of everyone how screwed we are, still maintaining some faith we'll figure it out. And they didn't need 'communism', 'mega city' or some other nebulous concept to help them to that conclusion-- it was/is either habitual, or fantastical.
You're right in that I never made it to the end, it was just that bad. It's like the weekend crap fearmonger articles you get on Zerohedge every weekend, albeit with better graphics. Not trolling.
Do you dispute the accuracy of the statements made in the article, or just that they should be put in writing?
If you believe the article to be filled with lies, you could explain why.
If you just think it's filled with truths that should not be uttered, that seems to me like a rather strange position to take. The goal is to build political will in favor of government action that puts a price on CO2 emissions. Terrifying people about things that are truly terrifying, while not guaranteed to help a whole lot, is at worst not counterproductive. And if you happen to terrify/enlighten/educate the right handful of rich people it might just have a tremendous impact.
To be honest I also at times thought the author's alarmism went a bit far and could have scared off serious readers, but as a general principle I still don't think its valid to critique someone on a basis that is non-existent: e.g., the author at no point explicitly endorsed any of the concepts or ideas you mentioned in the GP comment.
You're applying your feelings where there is well-informed scientific consensus on the matter. It's not sensationalism when the science backs it up. It's too bad you don't like it, but nobody really has anything to indicate the contrary.
Why the downvote? The article is clearly concern trolling. Look, if you are worried about overpopulation, the US isn't your primary area of concern. The US is not overpopulated and probably never will be. Maybe some US cities are, but compared to China, India, and Indonesia, we have no overpopulation problem. I'm not sure that "being alarmed" is a good state of mind to be in--Americans suffer from crisis fatigue as it is.
The human race isn't going to solve its problems without either leaving the earth or having a massive die-off. You first.
Yes, the article is blatant fear mongering. Every time a climate issue comes up it mentions human activity as the cause of all our problems. Outside of a Hail Mary technological solution, there is only one way to reduce human activity and that is to have fewer humans.
"But no matter how well-informed you are, you are surely not alarmed enough."
This person is literally saying we need to be alarmed.
I really didn't understand the part where they said methane has 34 times the greenhouse effect as carbon over a period of time and then changes the timeframe to bring the multiplier put to 84 times. To me it felt a lot like when congress talks about deficits over a decade - well actually they talk about reductions over a decade so it's times 10 and increases are just annual. Anyway, there is a difference between methane and CO2 but to try to make it sound worse by talking about time is just another alarmist tactic.
Regardless of your stance, this article is intended to be alarmist and even says so. IMHO it is not worthy of HN.