OVERLOOKED GASES: Methane, like that burning in the flame pictured, is one of several often overlooked greenhouse gases. Curbing their emissions could be both cheaper and easier than cutting carbon dioxide.
Image: © iStockphoto.com / Chris Pole
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The Other Greenhouse Gases
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When the world talks climate change—as is currently under way in Durban, South Africa—the main issue is carbon dioxide emissions. CO2 is emanating from the negotiators' mouths and the power plants and cars of their home countries—and that simple molecule is responsible for the bulk of global warming to date.
But CO2 isn't the only molecule trapping heat in the atmosphere. The warm conditions of the earth get a big boost from water vapor as well as several other culprits, some of which never existed in the atmosphere prior to human influence. Together, the other greenhouse gases account for roughly a third of the molecules trapping heat in the atmosphere — and more than a third of the overall warming of average temperatures globally.
What's more, cleaning up emissions of some of these other greenhouse gases may prove quite a lot simpler than cutting back on CO2—forestalling catastrophic climate change. In fact, some of the measures—such as capturing the methane released during oil production—actually save money in addition to the climate. The United Nations Environment Program estimates that cutting back on methane and soot emissions alone could prevent 0.7 degree Celsius of additional warming by 2040—and those cooling benefits could come faster than comparable cuts in CO2.
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21 Comments
Add CommentI hope that Rossi is successful with E-Cat
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWater vapor as a culprit? Well, I for one am going to stop boiling eggs. That should do it....
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWell, since most water vapor in the atmosphere is a FEEDBACK from CO2-induced warming, your eggs aren't the problem. Well, if you don't have a natural gas leak in your house that shoots the stuff out while you're cooking, that is.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs for the article itself, capturing methane and reducing halocarbon emissions will help lower the peak warming the Earth experiences while we work on lowering the long-term threat of CO2 overload in the atmosphere. If you can generate electricity with captured methane, like landfill gas and oil drilling / refining flare gas, then you displace the fuel you WOULD have burned to generate that electricity in the first place.
See, solving this climate change problem isn't going to be as hard as everybody makes it out to be.
There are less than 10 years left until human caused Climate Change becomes irreversible, according to the UN.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"A senior environmental official at the United Nations...says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed.....Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of "eco-refugees", threatening political chaos...governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control...."
Link
http://tinyurl.com/6x8r9yc
As their dire predictions fail they keep moving the goal posts so I would not panic just yet if I were you.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThey are permanently hitched to tomorrow, which never comes. Tell me one thing that they have predicted that has actually come to pass. A few years back they were predicting that at least every second year would become the new hottest on record. Now I think they have moved that back to 2015.
Loved your link.;)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe longer we delay, the harder it will be to eventually solve the problem. The more carbon we emit, the more warming we are locking ourselves into. Back in 1989, if we would have heeded the warnings and started cutting our emissions, the intensity and odds of the climate-related natural disasters we are experiencing TODAY would be lower. If anything, the IPCC has been UNDERESTIMATING the effects of climate change because the inherent conservatism in writing up the reports:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.skepticalscience.com/ipcc-scientific-consensus-intermediate.htm
Another source of IPCC's underestimate is that we are on the worst-case emissions track now and we're actually blowing past it recently.
I think that you are probably at the tipping point with this egg idea. Have at it and I'll stop drinking so much coffee - together we can change the world!!!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisnow it is high time that we stop playing blame-game and should be ready to give up our comfort zone.all with some sense should initiate it and american as a largest consumer of the natural resources around the world should put first foot ahead,whats wrong in setting an example.others are going to follow i am sure
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thiseat raw food . That will solve the problem.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow in the world do you dismiss the peer-reviewed science on skepticalscience.com out of hand and then put an article from policlimate.com as legitimate evidence? Talk about only listening to those that agree with you. I at least read through the scientific papers climate skeptics put forward (even when they're pseudo-scientific opinion pieces). Why don't you look at Figure 3 below and tell me HOW the IPCC is overstating sea level rise:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.skepticalscience.com/ipcc-scientific-consensus-intermediate.htm
Your statement is demonstrably false.
In addition, if you took all the CO2 out of the atmosphere, most of the water vapor in the air would eventually condense out as well due to the lower temperatures. H2O in the air is much too dependent on temperature to be a climate forcing and is a FEEDBACK. Given that you can't even understand this basic fact of climate science, it's no surprise that you are so utterly clueless on everything else concerning the Earth's climate.
Yes! Eating (more and more) raw food will solve the problem, along with most of our chronic health problems, too! Visit: Colour Eating Without Heating on youthevity.com
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBravo to Paul Mcartney having revived the old American tradition of 'Meat-free Mondays'! This could mean cutting the methane from our Holy Cows by one seventh!
Dr. Martin Hertzberg a few years ago wrote a report about the lynching of carbon dioxide, which showed that CO2 does not affect climate (report at http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/hertzberg.pdf). Dr. Hertzberg shows that carbon dioxide cannot change Earth's temperature because CO2 already blocks all 15-micron photons. Decreasing CO2, or increasing CO2 in the atmosphere thus has no effect on climate change! Similarly, methane has no effect on climate because photons that methane blocks are already totally blocked by water vapour.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is my understanding that recent evidence shows that CO2 does not cause global warming. The rise in CO2 is a result of, not a cause of Global warming. Indeed the highest levels of CO2 ever were at the height of the longest and coldest Ice age ever.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am tending to believe that our current period of warming which brought about the end of the mini ice age and began in the early 1800's (prior to the industrial revolution and has cont to this very day)has been a result of cycles within the Sun itself. There are I believe many cycles within cycles when they line up and start the Sun on either a higher output of energy or a lower output of energy the earth will experience a climate change. It will either have an ice age, or a warm period. The more I read about and get into our current situation the less I can accept that it is a result of CO2.
The fact that we have been warming is without doubt and unarguable. The cause of our warming is very much (or should be) debatable. I suppose just the scale of these cycles can cause a problem for humanity to grasp. ie a short cycle (the mini ice age)was 6-7 hundred years long. Long cycles are in the thousands of years.
Currently there is evidence indicating that the warming has stalled. The Argos Ocean drift buoy program has indicated that the oceans of the world have cooled slightly since about 2003 +/-. As we live on a water planet, if the oceans are not warming then we must accept the fact that the planet is not warming.
Mans estimation of his ability to cause or alter anything on the scale of the planets climate, is also I believe quite questionable. We do like to think that we are VERY important and all powerful. Sometimes I wonder if we are that important or that powerful. We certainly are and have been powerful enough to cause a number of disasters......but the climate..I'm not convinced yet. I'll keep an open mind though.
Biomass Pyrolysis captures and stores CO2. Pyrolysing plants converts them into hydrogen and charcoal. The hydrogen can be burnt to produce electricity. The charcoal, (renamed 'Biochar'), can be incorporated into soil where we have proof it remains for thousands of years. Biochar improves most soils and harvests. See www.eprida.com for details or look up 'International Biochar Initiative'. To be economical, the ton of CO2 needs to be set at $25.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThanks for a good counter balance to the hysteria. It is clear that the climate of the Earth is changing because that is what has always happened. I do believe that humans contribute a bit to the change but I doubt that it will be as severe as the spastic fanatics predict. A pretty simple check of natural disasters shows that they have not increased significantly in frequency or severity. What has increased is the number of people and the availability of global mass media. This means that more people are impacted than before and the news of every disaster is much more widely spread.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe best solution is for there to be fewer people. Natural disasters and catastrophic famine reduce the number of living people. Chemical contamination also reduces fertility in technological societies. Self correcting problem.
Check out the slide show and see where the greenhouse gasses come from. Then you will realise how idiotic your post was since very little of the GHGs come from cooking food in industrialized societies.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisActually he didn't prove that at all. Those 15 micron photons do indeed reach the surface as any simple detector will show. He proved that many of them are blocked and converted to heat in the upper atmosphere but his extrapolation from observable fact to wild hypothesis is incorrect.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn an article about greenhouse gasses other than CO2, why do you focus on CO2? If CO2 does nothing, what has that to do with N2O and all of the other gasses mentioned? Your post isn't as bad as the raw foods posts that completely ignore the article but it is only marginally better.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHere's a link from Sci Am from Nov of last yr:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=10-worst-toxic-pollution-problems-slide-show
And here's a link from the UK in Jan, 2012:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2093264/Forget-global-warming--Cycle-25-need-worry-NASA-scientists-right-Thames-freezing-again.html
Seems to me that we need to get our data straight. Maybe less gold and heavier coats? And what about those pesky volcanoes? And Ol Sol doing whatever it wants? Who knows?!!
It is true that increased CO2 concentration has just slightly pre-empted temperature increase, but increased CO2 concentrations also lead to an increase in temperature. The two are intricately intertwined. It seems, though, that the sun's variabilities have little to do with climate change; it is primarily due to the variability in earth's orbit.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThink of it this way (from a debt perspective):
I max out my credit card, which causes me to have to pay interest. The initial spending causes me to have to pay interest, and the interest causes even more debt. The same is true regarding the relationship between temperature and CO2 concentration.
An interesting video form a Penn State professor:
http://www.agu.org/meetings/fm09/lectures/lecture_videos/A23A.shtml