this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2025
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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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Technology for oxidizing atmospheric methane won't help the climate, researchers say (phys.org)
submitted 2 weeks ago by solo@slrpnk.net to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/17436050

As the atmosphere continues to fill with greenhouse gases from human activities, many proposals have surfaced to "geoengineer" climate-saving solutions, that is, alter the atmosphere at a global scale to either reduce the concentrations of carbon or mute its warming effect.

"Our work showed that the efficiency of the proposed technology was quite low, meaning widespread adoption of the technology would be required to make any meaningful impact on atmospheric CH4," said Mayhew, a postdoctoral researcher with the U's Wilkes Center for Climate Science & Policy. "Then, our results indicate that if this technology is adopted at scale, then we start to see some negative air-quality side effects, particularly for wintertime particulate matter air pollution."

The study

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[–] benjhm@sopuli.xyz 2 points 2 weeks ago

Methane is a big problem, tackling CH~4~ may be the only fast enough way to reduce peak warming. Also, by using up atmospheric oxisidising capacity, CH~4~ increases it’s own lifetime (i.e. the more we put in the air, the longer it hangs around) - a problematic positive feedback. First priority of course is to tackle the obvious emissions (especially from fossil installations - many in russia as well as usa) but it's still worth studying what might be done to reduce atmospheric CH~4~. Seems this proposal is not an effective solution, but partly a question of time and place .

[–] perestroika@slrpnk.net 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

About methane: dealing with it at the source (oil and gas drilling and mining, waste disposal, etc) is going to far less than dealing with it later in the atmosphere.

Knowledge of how to increase methane oxidation rates in air is good to have, however - in case some geochemical methane source (permafrost, hydrates) gets pushed over the edge and starts outputting more than tolerable.