ALB
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I think I am beginning to understand what the statement that “In the first two decades after its release, methane is around 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide” means.
It doesn’t mean that methane lasts decades in the atmosphere after it is emitted. It is a measure of how much more heating a given amount of methane creates compared to the same amount of CO2. For various chemical reasons CH4 absorbs more heat than CO2 and so is a more “potent” greenhouse gas. How much more depends on over what period you measure the extra warming effect.
If one considers a long time frame, then the longer-lived gases will appear stronger, and vice-versa if one considers a short time frame. This is why the values for methane appear to be all over the map. Methane sticks around for only about a dozen years, so it does its warming early on. Carbon dioxide, in contrast, can persist for thousands of years, steadily warming that whole time. As a result, methane’s potency is much higher if evaluated over 20 years rather than 100. (https://www.factcheck.org/2018/09/how-potent-is-methane/ )
The figure of 80 times more is based on a 20-year period (hence the “first two decades” in the quote). Over a 100-year period it’s about 30 times more. The measure is called “Global Warming Potential” (GWP). (As the standard, CO2’s GWP is 1 over any time period.)
For all this focus on methane’s potency, though, it’s useful to remember that methane is still a smaller overall contributor to climate change than CO2. As we’ve written before, CO2 is the main driver. Other gases, such as methane, are important, but they’re far less abundant. According to the IPCC, “carbon dioxide is the largest single contributor to radiative forcing over 1750–2011 and its trend since 1970.” By itself, CO2 accounted for 76 percent of all human-made greenhouse gases in 2010. Methane ranks as the second-largest single contributor, responsible for 16 percent of the same total if using the older GWP100 values, or 20 percent if using the newer ones. Go ahead, and take your pick.
To complete the picture:
in the U.S., 31 percent of methane emissions due to human activity come from the oil and gas industry; 26 percent come from livestock, such as cows; and another 16 percent come from landfills. Methane also has many natural sources, including wetlands and termites.
Natural gas, which when burned releases CO2, is methane. Also, as the last post from Alan points out, global warming results in more methane being released from natural sources.
By the time this discussion is over we’ll all be experts in global warming, hopefully inoculated against accepting claims without checking them !
In the first two decades after its release, methane is around 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide!
That claim is all over the internet but I can’t find its origin. It is contradicted by other statements that methane only lasts in the atmosphere for about 12 years (compared with hundreds of years for some CO2). For instance:
The lifetime in the air of CO2, the most significant man-made greenhouse gas, is probably the most difficult to determine, because there are several processes that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Between 65% and 80% of CO2 released into the air dissolves into the ocean over a period of 20–200 years. The rest is removed by slower processes that take up to several hundreds of thousands of years, including chemical weathering and rock formation. This means that once in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide can continue to affect climate for thousands of years.
Methane, by contrast, is mostly removed from the atmosphere by chemical reaction, persisting for about 12 years. Thus although methane is a potent greenhouse gas, its effect is relatively short-lived. (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/jan/16/greenhouse-gases-remain-air )
Help, Dave BSc !
It also ends up by urging them to abandon being non-violent as this, supposedly, “protects the state”.
Finally, if you’d like a longer analysis of how the state and media represses or co-opts protest movements, I highly recommend you pick up a copy of How Non Violence Protects The State.
The Extinct activists might even consider that this means that the whole message might have come from an agent provocateur urging them to take violent action. (I’ve just been to see Mike Leigh’s film on Peterloo in which Oliver the Spy makes an appearance, in the film that is.) In any event, that there are such people around is a possibility that those who engage in illegal activity have to consider, and it means that they can’t trust everybody, especially as there will already be undercover police in Extinct. This is something the anarchist forgot to mention, though it is also part of anarchist experience.
Armed with critical thinking about long-term predictions from our discussion of climate change, we can also be sceptical about the government and Bank of England predictions about what will happen depending on the type of Brexit that happens:
The Bank of England is at least explicit in stating that its scenario is a worst-case one:
The central bank considered the worst-case scenario to be a Brexit where the UK is unable to agree to a deal with the European Union and there is no transition period after March 2019.
In this situation, the UK economy would suffer for years and be about 8% smaller by the end of 2023, compared to the bank’s most recent projections. There are also expectations for inflation to peak at 6.5% and unemployment to peak at 7.5%. House prices could fall by about 30% and interest rates could spike.
The Bank of England (BoE) also expects an exodus of tens of thousands of people leaving the UK each year in the midst of such a downturn.Since the UK is highly unlikely to (I’m prepared to say won’t) leave the EU on 29 March without any arrangements being made, this really is Project Fear. The government is evidently pulling out the stops to try to get its deal adopted.
As to the government’s 15-year predictions, these aren’t worth the paper they are printed on. Nobody can predict how the capitalist economy will be even in one year let alone fifteen. It is curious, though, that the government itself is predicting that the policy it is pursuing will slow down the accumulation of capital.
I know it’s a bit embarrassing to be agreeing with the Mad Brexiteers but on this point they are correct: we are not all going to die. So, keep calm and carry on watching the capitalists and their political representatives arguing over the best trading arrangements for capitalist business.
It does look that we are heading towards a second referendum and the festival of xenophobia that will be.
That sort of article, whether intentionally or not, diverts the blame for global warming from the capitalist profit-seeking economic system on to individuals. If only they would eat less meat or ride a bicycle instead of driving a car. As the (second) article linked to actually puts it:
When people ask, ‘but what can I do about climate change?’ we have an answer, ‘eat less beef.’ We can also drive less by cutting unnecessary trips — for example, grocery shopping only once a week. Turning down the thermostat in winter and up in summer to reduce energy consumption (and lower gas and electricity bills), walking or bicycling instead of driving short distances for better health and for our environment are suggestions we have heard before. It’s time we complied.
Smug people telling us what to do again. Well, we can guilt-trip them in return by pointing out that they are prolonging the problem by not working to get rid of capitalism.
The reason cows, sheep and goats emit methane is that they consume so much fibre in their diet. Humans, too, emit methane and, because they eat more fibre, vegetarians and vegans more than the rest of us. Put crudely, they fart more. In any event, the logic of the anti-cow argument is not that we should become non-meat-eaters but equally that we could eat different types of meat, birds and fish and pigs and horses instead.
But there’s another problem, methane (CH4) is a greenhouse gas but does not work the same as carbon dioxide (CO2). CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere while CH4 is broken down fairly rapidly and recycled at a given level. I don’t understand why the WMO seems to be including methane as a “long-lived greenhouse gas”. We (including me) are getting out of our depth here but maybe Dave Bsc can explain.
In any event, CO2 is the main culprit and it’s emissions of that that have to be reduced. Once they have been, then methane emissions shouldn’t be a problem. Don’t forget that we need some greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to avoid Earth cooling to -18 degrees centigrade.
Good rebuttal based on facts, but why do you say the argument is different from ours? Isn’t our argument too that in conditions like this people don’t act like capitalist homo economicus but abide by generally accepted rules whether written or unwritten, in the common interest? It only becomes a tragedy under capitalism, where you have, for instance, profit-seeking fishing companies competing to make a profit out of fishing.
Farmer Roberts makes a couple of good points against the vegan lobby: hill farming in Wales (renowned for sheep) and health scares about meat as such (not as adulterated under capitalism). They are on a sticky wicket there as there are also health issues about a vegan diet, especially for cats:
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/7817089/cats-vegan-diet-warning-rspca/
The only justification for veganism is an ethical one but that doesn’t give them the right to impose their ethics on others. As here:
No wonder they are so unpopular. People don’t like holier-than-thou types.
Self-righteousness (also called sanctimoniousness, sententiousness, and holier-than-thou attitudes) is a feeling or display of (usually smug) moral superiority derived from a sense that one’s beliefs, actions, or affiliations are of greater virtue than those of the average person. Self-righteous individuals are often intolerant of the opinions and behaviours of others.
How would they like it if a gang of meat-eaters barged into a vegan restaurant eating hamburgers?
Anyway, haven’t we discussed this enough? It’s got nothing to do with socialism. We are just providing a platform for food faddism.
Dave B wrote
The international capitalist class are fragmented into ruthlessly competing economic blocks. They are , or the capitalist economic system, is endemically incapable of co-operating even to prevent their own obvious destruction.
Tony Cliff’s righthand man in the SWP, Chris Harman, came to the same conclusion in this article from 2007:
What applies to the economy applies to the environment. Governments and individual capitalists may be able to see where the pumping out of greenhouse gases is leading, but not one of them is going to sacrifice their own competitiveness to take the necessary countermeasures – even though what comes afterwards will literally be floods in Bangladesh, the Nile Delta, and eventually, London. (http://socialistreview.org.uk/334/slump-boom-and-climate-change)
And then he goes and spoils it by saying something silly like:
To say green investment makes sense in a recession is right, but it is not capitalist sense. People can see better public transport as an alternative to cars. They can see massive insulation programmes as logical at a time of soaring heating bills. And jobs in insulation schemes and alternative energy programmes offer more to construction workers threatened with redundancy than blaming foreign workers who face the same plight. But it is not capitalism that is going to make those alternatives real – it is the struggle against capitalism.
So it’s the “struggle against capitalism” that’s going to impose this on the capitalist class and system. Oh dear.
What about the actual abolition of capitalism and the establishment of socialism as a system of society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the Earth’s natural and industrial resources, with production directly to satisfy people’s needs instead of for profit?
This has been published while Alan is asleep:
https://news.un.org/en/story/2018/11/1026691
They say:
The authors of the report note that nations would need to triple their efforts on climate action without further delay, in order to meet the 2°C-rise limit by mid-century. To meet the 1.5°C limit, they would have to quintuple their efforts. A continuation of current trends will likely result in global warming of around 3°C by the end of the century, with continued temperature rises after that, according to the report findings.
So we don’t get the degree rises confused, the 3°C rise here is what is predicted if current promised emission reduction measures are applied (the 5°C rise mentioned in other reports is what is predicted if nothing is done and emissions continue at their current rate).
Implementing unconditional NDCs [National Determined Contributions], and assuming that climate action continues consistently throughout the 21st Century, would lead to a global mean temperature rise of about 3.2°C (with a range of 2.9–3.4°C) by 2100 relative to pre-industrial levels.
So the “threat” at the moment is of an increase in global average temperature by 2100 of around 3°C above pre-industrial levels, i.e an extra 2°C this century. Though of course not as bad as a 5°C rise, this would have still serious consequences in terms of rising sea levels, more severe weather and population movements.
Due to conflicting economic interests between states and their jockeying for competitive advantage the chances of them agreeing to cut emissions in the next decade or so to limit the rich to 2°C, let alone 1.5°C, look remote. Let’s see what happens (or doesn’t happen) at the Climate Change Conference in Katowice next month).
OK. I missed that as it didn’t mention the Met Office but it did send me to the Guardian report, which I guessed would be as tendentious as the Independent one but couldn’t find it. It is as bad:
The warning came as a Met Office report found Britain would experience much wetter winters and summers as much as 5C hotter as a result of climate change.
So the Guardian shares the prize for bad and dishonest journalism with the Independent. All it required to not get this prize was to have said “could” instead of “would” like the BBC did.
Thought I would beat Alan to bring this news of a report from the Met Office:
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/news/releases/2018/ukcp18-launch-pr
Today’s Times reports its finding as follows:
The research, led by the Met Office, predicted that by 2070 summer temperatures could be up to 5.4C higher than the average in the 1980s and 90s if global emissions rise at the highest plausible level and winters could be up to 4.2C warmer. Even in a “low emissions scenario” where greenhouse gas emissions are cut and global temperatures rise by 2.4C compared with pre-industrial levels, the UK is expected to experience an increase in average yearly temperature of up to 2.3C by 2100 compared with the 1980s and 90s.</p>
It depends on how you report it. The BBC has CLIMATE CHANGE: UK SUMMERS COULD BE OVER 5C BY 2070. The Independent, on the other hand, has CLIMATE CHANGE TO MAKE UK SUMMERS MORE THAN 5C HOTTER BY 2070, MET OFFICE WARNS.
The Independent wins the prize for bad and dishonest journalism.
Today’s Times reports Trump as adding after his dismissal of that report
that he would not take measures to cut emissions unless other countries did.
That’s what they are all saying but can’t agree on what measures to take as whatever they decide will advantage some states and disadvantage others.
Whatever else you can say about Trump he doesn’t attempt to hide the capitalist interests behind US policies. He renounces the Paris Agreement on the grounds that it is not good for US businesses, i.e that the restrictions on carbon emissions it envisages puts them at a competitive disadvantage compared with businesses operating from other capitalist states. And now he says it again: if US adopts clean technologies but the rest of the world doesn’t that’s not good, i.e. puts the US at a competitive disadvantage. Such jockeying to avoid being disadvantaged is of course why the capitalist states of the world are finding it impossible to agree to do what scientists say is needed to prevent average global temperature rising by more than 2 degrees C (let alone 1.5 degrees) compared with pre-industrial levels by the end of the century (that’s a further 1 degree as they’ve already risen 1 degree since then, which means that sea levels are going to go up even if all current emissions are stopped).
The Reuters news item about this says:
The congressionally mandated report http://www.globalchange.gov said that climate change will cost the country’s economy billions of dollars by the end of the century
The exchanges on this forum will have taught us to assess such news items critically. What the Report demanded by Congress actually says is that climate change would cost the US billions of dollars if emissions continue at their present rate. That was the Report’s worst case scenario, but it also presents other scenarios in which emissions are reduced and which will have a lesser economic effect.
Trump says he doesn’t believe it, but it is not clear what he doesn’t believe. It could be either that he doesn’t believe the prediction of what would happen if emissions continue at their present level or that he doesn’t believe that its economic consequences will come about as some measures will be taken to reduce emissions. Or it could be both,
I’m afraid, ZJW, I couldn’t work what all this was about, never having heard of half (more than half) of those mentioned. It strikes me that the author should have followed the advice we were given in Speakers Class — never use irony as people will take you literally. It’s true.
The stated aim is vague as an endgame, but then you could argue the same about our “classless, moneyless, socialist society” with very few details.
No you couldn’t ! Our “system change” is quite clear. It’s a change from class and minority control to common ownership and democratic control of the means of wealth production, so permitting production directly to satisfy people’s needs instead of production for profit and capital accumulation. Of course this will achieve their aim of a system “which maximises well-being and minimises harm”. But that aim is so vague that even supporters of capitalism can, and in fact do, claim this for the profit system.
I agree, though, that in raising the question of “system change” they are introducing an idea that we can expand on.
