Re:Scientists raise alarm over ‘dangerously fast’ growth in ...
by actually_a_dog on Tuesday February 08, 2022 @01:51AM
(#30255616)
Let’s not forget that water vapor is also a greenhouse gas. That makes methane worse than CO2 100% of the time.
Re:Scientists raise alarm over ‘dangerously fast’ growth in ...
by kergonath on Tuesday February 08, 2022 @02:19AM
(#30255752)
Water vapour is a greenhouse gas, but it comes back down as rain quite quickly. It's also more or less in (dynamical) equilibrium, because there is always a huge source of atmospheric water in the form of evaporation from the oceans' surface. The way to meaningfully increase atmospheric water content is to increase atmospheric temperature, which methane contributes to, but that's a second order effect.
Re:Scientists raise alarm over ‘dangerously fast’ growth in ...
by raverbashing on Tuesday February 08, 2022 @01:58AM
(#30255653)
I suspect that's not so much worrying as there are plenty of vapour sources on Earth (like the vast oceans)
More water -> less evaporation (but the partial pressure will remain the same more or less)
So as long as it’s methane it’s hundreds of times worse than CO2, then it becomes the same as co2[0]. Never better.
Which is why despite a short half life it has a global warming potential of ~25 over 100 years (Co2 is 1).
Then you also have the issue that even if it’s short (relatively, it takes multiples of the half-life to really taper off) for that duration your GW effect really shoots up, which tends not to be a good thing, 120 years is already quite short for biological systems to adapt, 10 is basically infeasible.
[0] actually a bit worse still as 1t ch4 yields 2.7t co2 and gwp is mass-relative