> Methane naturally turns into CO2 in the atmosphere
After how long? A half-life of a decade, as I understand it? Not exactly the order of magnitude of luxury time we have to spare.
> Even if it did increase warming more than CO2
"Even if it did" is strange wording for an established fact. Do you write "even if the sky was blue"?
> once methane emissions reach a steady level, reducing methane emissions won't change a thing
It's kind of really, really important how high that "steady level" is and how fast we'd reach it though, no? We're not just worried about life 1,000 years from now. We're worried about life 20 years from now.
> The narrative is extremely misleading.
I find this statement strange after reading your comment.
> It's kind of really, really important how high that "steady level" is and how fast we'd reach it though, no?
(Update: In hindsight I'm not sure you were talking about methane emissions in general or about methane from meat production. Here, I'm focussing on the latter. Meanwhile, fossil methane is of course a huge problem.)
As for the second part of your question: When it comes to meat production, we have already reached the steady state.
As for the first part: Yes. But it is not that high. Let's say the total amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere due to cattle (and rice and other types of agriculture) account for a fraction X of the world's yearly emissions. (In Germany, for instance, X = 0.06, i.e. 6%.) Let's assume for simplicity the remaining emissions are exclusively due to fossil fuels and all emissions are the same every year. Let Y be the fraction of agricultural emissions relative to fossil emissions, i.e. Y = X/(1-X). (= 6.4% for Germany)
Then, after N years, the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere due to agriculture, relative to the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere due to fossil fuels (burned during that timeframe) will be Y/N. This is because agricultural greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will stay constant – because we're in a steady state – but greenhouse gases due to fossil fuels will keep on accumulating.
> When it comes to meat production, we have already reached the steady state.
Well yes but also no, we've reached a steady state. If we reduce meat production we would reach a new, lower steady state which would buy some more time.
completely ignores my (admittedly back-of-the-envelope) calculation. Please do point out if there's an error somewhere but until then I will stand by my point: Emissions from meat production – even with meat consumption as high as it is these days – are negligible in the grand scheme of things. We better focus our efforts elsewhere.
Besides, what kind of food would we replace the meat with? That food would also need to be grown, harvested, transported, and so on. In the end, we might not gain much in terms of greenhouse gases.
With the exception of agriculturally marginal land, using land to produce food by way of animals is typically vastly more wasteful than using it to produce human-edible food directly, certainly on a per-calorie basis. There's no shortage of studies demonstrating the potential for genuine reductions in emissions (both CO2 and CH4), and reductions in the need for land-clearing, indeed freeing up land that can reforested etc. if we didn't insist on such (land-) inefficient methods of food production. Even if the emissions-savings benefits were negligible, it's hard to thing of too other many lifestyle changes we could make that have such potential ecological benefits than moderating meat consumption. If done sensibly and thoughtfully it's almost certainly going to benefit your personal health too (and, I'd argue, your tastebuds!).
But obviously there's a cultural shift involved that won't happen overnight - restaurants/food retailers in particular often seem afraid to offer any more than one or two token meat-free dishes, despite the fact that if I were to list the 10 most amazing meals I've had in recent years, maybe 1 (2 at most) would contain any meat.
Animals for meet are killed before reaching adult age but it still takes longer time then one season of plant growth. They need to eat those in meantime.
Fossil fuels are used to make fertilizer on a massive scale as well as power a lot of equipment used, so agriculture is currently a piece of the fossil fuel problem.
> After how long? A half-life of a decade, as I understand it? Not exactly the order of magnitude of luxury time we have to spare
Doesn't matter, if we keep the number of heads of cattle constant, the methane from them in the atmosphere will be constant.
If we keep using the same number of ICE cars otoh, the CO2 from them in the atmosphere will keep increasing. We would have to drop the number of ICE cars to 0 to stop the increase.
Not if the methane is produced through carbon from plants, in which case methane will stay constant but CO2 being sucked from the atmosphere would occur at the same rate as methane emission.
It's sourcing food from petroleum that causes the problem.
As the sibling already said: We're in a closed loop. Methane decomposes into CO2, so if you want to maintain a constant level of methane in the atmosphere, energy/mass conservation dictates that this carbon needs to come from somewhere else. Solution: It actually comes from the CO2, via grass growth & the cattle's digestive system. The amount of CO2, averaged over time, therefore cannot increase.
There are two directions to look at it: convincing yourself via a convincing story, or convincing yourself via a convincing calculation.
The story they tell defies basic thermodynamic intuition, and seems to skip over all the parts that would put the narrative in doubt.
The premise is that greenhouse gases absorb black body radiation from the surface.
First of all, greenhouse gas is a bad name, greenhouses warm because of air convection. So the "greenhouse" intuition they try to abuse is misleading.
Secondly, think about this thought experiment: a layer of pure CO2 gas covers the lowest layer of air near the surface. By how much would that get warmer compared to air? The answer is there won't be any difference. That's because the surface and the air near it are at the same temperature, so they emit exactly the same amount of energy. All systems with same temperature are at an equilibrium.
So what can possibly cause warming is only the effect of the difference in temperatures between the CO2 gas and the surface. Which should only be significant in higher altitudes. Which have much less CO2 because it is heavier. And it's also not clear, in this situation, in which direction the weather near the surface will change.
But then you realize there are also effects of increasing methane / CO2 which decrease warming. The most obvious effect is that they have higher heat capacity. Heat capacity goes together with absorption: the absorption is possible only because the molecules have more degrees of freedom to vibrate. So it's usually around the same order of magnitude. And higher heat capacity means faster cooling from convection and it means the air requires more energy to heat up. In fact, you can think of the entire climate change claim as a statement about the entire earth heat capacity.
So I'm entirely unconvinced by the story. But that should've been OK because there are detailed calculations. There are models.
Except these models are dumpster fire. You can download some of them from NASA's website and judge the quality of code for yourself. Old fortran code, all the models copy code from each other, many things which aren't constant physically are constant in the code, functions full of tens of "if else" statements whose physical validity is highly in question.
But those models should've been tested? Except they don't. There's no way to test them. From basic software engineering perspective, it is insane to trust these things to make the kind of trillion dollar decisions they make.
But all models point to climate change! Well they all copy code from each other. But that's not the only problem. They are all thermodynamic simulations which substitute the full state of the system with average states.
In other words, they all, by design, underestimate the entropy of the system. And thermodynamic energy is entropy times temperature, and since they get the energy right (just the sun) you expect them all to get higher temperature. So it is actually expected from all simulations to overestimate warming.
There are also other glaring counter intuitive things about the narrative. Somehow CO2 effects continue to work slowly over decades, and the system doesn't reach an equilibrium with the current levels of CO2 until decades ahead.
This is completely against normal thermodynamic intuition. Meta stable states exist, yes, and there are out of equilibrium systems. But usually the reason for systems not reaching the more stable state, is that their fluctuations are too small. In this case, the fluctuations are much much bigger than the supposed stable state change. We're talking about barely a degree change over decades in systems that fluctuate by several degrees daily. It makes no sense to claim their equilibrium will only be reached in decades while their fluctuation exceeds the difference to equilibrium daily.
> So what can possibly cause warming is only the effect of the difference in temperatures between the CO2 gas and the surface
This is wrong. If you do the math, you actually find that you get warming from CO2 if the atmosphere is colder, the same temp, or hotter than the surface.
When the ground emits a photon there are two possibilities. it either gets absorbed by an atom in the atmosphere or it goes to space. about half of the photons absorbed by the atmosphere get radiated back to the earth (compared to roughly zero percent of the ones that go to space).
Since CO2 is better than air at absorbing infrared radiation, it traps some energy that would otherwise be lost. The situation isn't really any different than wearing a coat. a jacket will warm you even if the jacket is colder than you are because it prevents some heat from leaving the system. this doesn't violate thermodynamics because the jacket itself isn't causing warming, it's just preventing heat loss to a colder source.
The jacket is preventing heat loss via convection. You literally can't prevent heat loss from radiation. By the zeroth law, an object with specific temperature is at thermal equilibrium with photonic heat bath at the same temperature. If you look at the interface between them, whether there's CO2 there or a black body doesn't matter, because you could replace it with photonic heat bath. The comparison to greenhouse (convection) and to jacket (again, thermal convection / conduction) is misleading exactly because it evokes the wrong intuition.
The better comparison is to a black hole. Literally nothing can escape it - not even light - so it is much worse than CO2. Yet it still has a temperature, and it still emits radiation according to its temperature. You cannot absorb more than black body.
The "better than air at absorbing" isn't an arbitrary statement. It comes from extra degrees of freedom in the gas that can absorb the heat. And the difference in absorbing thermal heat between any two systems MUST be a result of their temperature difference, because they must be at equilibrium if they have the same temperature.
If any two systems of the same temperature had a difference in energy emitted by radiation between them, that would violate the second law, and you would create temperature differences between them (heat would flow) and extract work from the temperature difference without needing a colder reservoir.
This is physics misunderstanding. There's no such thing as "equilibrium temperature" between two systems. The zeroth law of thermodynamics is that all you need to know in order to tell whether two systems are at thermodynamic equilibrium with each other is the temperature. If they have the same temperature, they are at equilibrium, period. You don't need to know anything else.
In this case, a wall which only allows transfer of heat via radiation (say, two simple thin transparent walls that only stop particles with vacuum gaps between them) is a diathermal wall.
Climate arguments with laypeople is usually full of things that go against common sense thermodynamic intuition, and then the funny thing is that when you state the common sense thermodynamic intuition, which doesn't fit the narrative, they object to things which are as basic physics as you can get.
I bet that the confidence in climate change takes a nose dive with understanding of physics. It reaches a stable position somewhere of "well we're doing approximations too so without looking into it, maybe their approximations aren't so bad". If you do go looking into it in detail, you're either too invested to go against it, or you go against it and get cancelled / whatever, and then you're faced with a squad of believers who understand nothing but defend it with absolute confidence, with understanding that sounds more like caloric or phlogiston theory than actual modern physics.
There's a funny social gradient from climate modelers which know exactly how far away from the truth these models are, but still do the best that they can, to their managers, press releases, activists, politicians, where the entire thing looks like a game of broken telephone. And the honest people who say "I'm doing the best I can but I know it's not enough" are probably drowning in the shadow of those with dishonest conviction.
EDIT: to also correct a little simplification, you can prevent heat loss to radiation by reflectivity. But that's not the case with CO2 in the atmosphere, the arguments of greenhouse effect is not about reflectivity. Reflectivity would be the albedo of the surface, which is indeed important. But the atmosphere is completely negligible for reflectivity purposes.
Actually the model for the greenhouse effect is pretty simple, climate models are much more sophisticated than that for example CESM have about 5000 equations as the model takes into account interactions between the biosphere and the atmosphere, clouds and carbon stocks. But greenhouse effects is a really simple you can implement it yourself and verify the results, here's a good start https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idealized_greenhouse_model
> EDIT: to also correct a little simplification, you can prevent heat loss to radiation by reflectivity. But that's not the case with CO2 in the atmosphere
CO2 absorbing some infrared light and transmitting it back to the earth is a form of reflection.
"So what can possibly cause warming is only the effect of the difference in temperatures between the CO2 gas and the surface. Which should only be significant in higher altitudes. Which have much less CO2 because it is heavier."
My understanding is that CO2 being heavier results in it having lower concentration only at very high altitudes, which are irrelevant for CO2-caused warming. At the relevant altitudes, it's well mixed due to winds.
In the basic mechanism as I understand it, what's relevant is the altitude at which a photon emitted by CO2 is likely to escape to space, rather than being reabsorbed by another CO2 molecule. If CO2 concentration is increased, this altitude goes up, to where CO2 concentration is the same as before. At higher altitudes, the temperature is lower, so emission is from a colder gas, which means less energy is emitted. This isn't a stable situation, however, since the amount of energy coming in is the same as before. Equilibrium is restored when the whole atmosphere heats up a bit, so the temperature at the altitude where photons escape to space is the same as before.
Understanding this makes the discussion about positive feedback from water vapour seem more iffy. Warming is supposed to increase H2O in the atmosphere, which is a greenhouse gas, indeed, the one with most effect. But all that matters is the amount of H2O at the altitude where photons are emitted to space. What happens at that altitude seems like a very complex question, so one is really back to trusting the simulations, which as you say don't seem all that trustworthy.
> So what can possibly cause warming is only the effect of the difference in temperatures between the CO2 gas and the surface.
This shows you have a complete misunderstanding of the basic physics going on.
If you have a source of radiation directly hitting a surface, some of the radiation will warm the surface by being absorbed by the surface material, but some of that radiation will be reflected back into space. When you add air on top of such surface, the air will capture both some of the direct radiation, as well as some of the reflected radiation. That's what causes extra warming of the surface compared to the situation without air. Now, air is a mix of several gases... different gases absorb very different amounts of radiation in the sunlight spectrum... what we're saying when we say methane is much more powerful as a greenhouse gas than CO2, is that methane can absorb much more radiation, which makes it warm up much more than CO2, and that heat stays around until dissipated back into space, which takes quite a long time!
Now that you understand the process at play, I hope it's obvious that your comment above is incredibly wrong on so many levels. IT's ok to be wrong, but I hope you're able to look for what's real and try to understand things better to avoid making such comments that may lead innocent people into a complete misunderstanding of the situation.
> That's what causes extra warming of the surface compared to the situation without air.
While this effect may be real, it's not what people are referring to as the "greenhouse effect". This requires the absorption and re-emission as IR. Methane and CO2 are considered greenhouse gases because they absorb thermal IR, not because they absorb reflected light from the surface.
In addition to the Wikipedia article machina_ex_deus linked, this might be a good intro: http://forecast.uchicago.edu/archer.ch4.greenhouse_gases.pdf. I'm not sure if I buy all of machina_ex_deus's conclusions, but I think his description of the effect is much closer to accurate than yours.
No, you're the one misunderstanding the physics. The reflected radiation is in a different spectrum than greenhouse gas absorption spectrum. The greenhouse effect is supposed to be about the difference in thermal radiation absorption frequencies, not sunlight absorption frequencies. You can read again about greenhouse effect to see that you misunderstood it. CO2 is the same as air in sunlight spectrum, which is the reflected radiation. Both are negligible. The entire argument rests on thermal radiation absorption, not sunlight absorption.
Do you have any background in physics at all? Seems like you don't really understand physics.
You seem to be looking for a slightly misleading representation of what the "greenhouse effect" actually means to go on an irrelevant tangent about whether or not CO2 and methane cause global warming. If you ignore the term "greenhouse" and just think about the physical process by which the Earth's temperature changes, you will see that what I said is much more accurate than your silly interjection about what greenhouse means. I am sure you understand that the Earth is not in any sort of thermal equilibrium, but you keep saying that. It's like you just ignore the Sun, which is what drives the whole process, and only consider what would happen if you had a solid and a gas under thermal equilibrium, and then changed the gas, which is completely irrelevant to how atmospheric temperature changes depending on the contents of the atmosphere (and assuming changes in Sun radiation are neglibigle). I really think you're intentionally trying to murk the waters to troll us all.
I'd recommend watching this video if you'd like to know the more nuanced story behind climate change: https://youtu.be/oqu5DjzOBF8
I am not qualified at all to really comment on it but this did open my eyes to how confusing the entire thing is.
I know that video. The thing is, when you get to this point, it should've been pretty clear for any honest scientists that you shouldn't trust the narrative / story, you should do the full calculation, and be honest about how trustworthy the calculation is.
The picture presented is as if the story is already enough (it definitely isn't), and the shortcomings of the calculations are not important, while the truth is that the story was heavily biased, and the calculations are very important. And the calculations really are dumpster fire.
I have to agree, when money and interests like with the situation around climate change are involved its hard to do actual science, it just turns into a fucked up manipulation game.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Earth was funded by the Charles A. Koch Foundation, which hoped to get a contrarian result backed by real science. The study lead was a climate science skeptic at the time. It reached the same conclusion as everyone else.
> Secondly, think about this thought experiment: a layer of pure CO2 gas covers the lowest layer of air near the surface. By how much would that get warmer compared to air? The answer is there won't be any difference. That's because the surface and the air near it are at the same temperature, so they emit exactly the same amount of energy.
You've added an assumption in your question that the entire atmosphere is at the same temperature. This is trivially false; the atmosphere varies greatly in temperature. Some levels of the atmosphere can heat others, and indeed would do so more if those levels are composed of gasses which absorb more energy in the frequencies emitted, like CO2 does in practice.
> the absorption is possible only because the molecules have more degrees of freedom to vibrate.
The gases in the atmosphere are not blackbodies. They absorb different amounts of radiation at different frequencies because of those vibrational modes. If you substitute a gas in the atmosphere that absorbs no infrared with one that absorbs a lot of infrared, the atmosphere overall absorbs more energy and therefore warms.
> Except these models are dumpster fire. You can download some of them from NASA's website and judge the quality of code for yourself. Old fortran code, all the models copy code from each other,
The code quality has absolutely nothing to do with the predictive power of those models. Unless you have found bugs in the code, this is irrelevant.
> many things which aren't constant physically are constant in the code, functions full of tens of "if else" statements whose physical validity is highly in question.
Of course simplifying assumptions have been made. Can you point to an example of a variable made constant that you think is an oversimplification that would change the predictions so drastically as to remove warming from added CO2?
> There are also other glaring counter intuitive things about the narrative. Somehow CO2 effects continue to work slowly over decades, and the system doesn't reach an equilibrium with the current levels of CO2 until decades ahead.
I'm really not sure what you're trying to say here. It seems like you're implying that all thermodynamic changes to a system have to occur instantaneously. We may also not reach equilibrium for a very long time, if (as is very possible!) the warming of the Earth decreases its albedo.
> This is completely against normal thermodynamic intuition. Meta stable states exist, yes, and there are out of equilibrium systems. But usually the reason for systems not reaching the more stable state, is that their fluctuations are too small. In this case, the fluctuations are much much bigger than the supposed stable state change. We're talking about barely a degree change over decades in systems that fluctuate by several degrees daily. It makes no sense to claim their equilibrium will only be reached in decades while their fluctuation exceeds the difference to equilibrium daily.
I'm sorry, but your understanding of thermodynamics is extremely flawed. Metastable states have nothing to do with this. You are also making the basic error of confusing weather with climate here. The temperature increase that is discussed in climate science is an increase in the total energy of the atmosphere. By increasing the ability of the atmosphere to absorb energy, you increase its energy.
You are also arguing against models but have completely failed to address the fact that the atmosphere _is warming_. This is being measured and is no longer a hypothetical.
You skipped the part where I explicitly concluded that the effect comes from the difference in temperatures. I don't ignore it, I first understand the zero order - at uniform temperatures, there is no effect of CO2. Which leads to an understanding that if CO2 does indeed make a difference, it is the result of the temperature differences.
Then the part where I'm not at all certain about which direction the effect should be, is because while CO2 decreases thermal conductivity by radiation, it increases thermal conductivity by convection because the heat capacity is higher for CO2. Which is actually a much better intuition if you want to understand how does water vapor seems to have such negligible effect despite the fact it is a "greenhouse gas" and "absorbs much more heat".
You want me to point out bugs? There are like 20 different climate models. I've seen heat capacity being constant independent of pressure, temperature, CO2, density, etc. Not just heat capacity, but also other "constants". Not in a single place because the code is a mess, they actually have several different modules with different constants, so say the radiation simulation is extremely detailed mess that's completely unreadable, and the cloud simulation just starts all over with their own different constants.
Writing such code is somewhat human task, but reasoning about the magnitude of the mess that is going on there and which directions the errors will go is beyond the capabilities of anyone. It could be possible but not with the way it's currently written.
I'm sorry, but it is your thermodynamic intuition that's completely wrong. Equilibrium to you means "things stop moving". That... not how thermodynamics works at all. The reason that ordinary things look like they are "not moving" in equilibrium in your everyday life is because they do move, but at scales much smaller than you. Do the Brownian motion experiment.
And meta-stable states have everything to do with this, again this is your lack of understanding of physics, not mine. Given a thermodynamic system, there's expansion around the meta stable state or the unstable state over time, where you get the duration to reach equilibrium from the size of the fluctuations. The gist of the expansion is that what delays reaching equilibrium is that the fluctuations are too small.
There's infinite reasons why warming might be happening. Just the direction itself is a single bit of information with no significance whatsoever. It isn't worth my time arguing against a theory whose statistical strength is one bit.
The models don't have any significance beyond this bit or maybe two bits if you try to be generous about their abysmal performance regarding temperatures. They had some success at very high attitudes, but that's not surprising as these high attitudes are just so much simpler to predict and have no bearing on the rest of the model and the actual climate as observed on the ground. They excuse their shortcoming as the "weather", but if your models don't have any feedback from reality and testing around the parts that matter, why should I trust them ?
Have you considered that the Dunning–Kruger effect might be in play here? You're making lots of big claims and insisting everyone who disagrees with you doesn't understand physics. I have a degree in astrophysics and I've worked quite hard to get through thermodynamics courses. I'm quite confident that I do understand the thermodynamics involved here. Your argument seems to boil down to:
- The fact that you don't understand the mechanism through which CO2 would heat the atmosphere, and therefore you think it isn't happening.
- You reject every single climate model because of the simplifying assumptions and "bad code". Given that simplifying assumptions are necessary to do modeling and the amount of conspiratorial thinking in your other comments, I suspect that there aren't any assumptions you would agree with.
- You admit that warming is happening, but don't consider that to be evidence in favour of the models (even though they fit the data quite well). You claim they fit it poorly, well, let's see that study then!
> You skipped the part where I explicitly concluded that the effect comes from the difference in temperatures. I don't ignore it, I first understand the zero order - at uniform temperatures, there is no effect of CO2. Which leads to an understanding that if CO2 does indeed make a difference, it is the result of the temperature differences.
This is a vacuous statement.
> Then the part where I'm not at all certain about which direction the effect should be, is because while CO2 decreases thermal conductivity by radiation, it increases thermal conductivity by convection because the heat capacity is higher for CO2. Which is actually a much better intuition if you want to understand how does water vapor seems to have such negligible effect despite the fact it is a "greenhouse gas" and "absorbs much more heat".
Your lack of understanding is not a flaw in climate science.
> You want me to point out bugs? There are like 20 different climate models. I've seen heat capacity being constant independent of pressure, temperature, CO2, density, etc. Not just heat capacity, but also other "constants". Not in a single place because the code is a mess, they actually have several different modules with different constants, so say the radiation simulation is extremely detailed mess that's completely unreadable, and the cloud simulation just starts all over with their own different constants.
This is just you repeating what you said before. The code quality is not relevant unless you point out a bug.
> I'm sorry, but it is your thermodynamic intuition that's completely wrong. Equilibrium to you means "things stop moving". That... not how thermodynamics works at all. The reason that ordinary things look like they are "not moving" in equilibrium in your everyday life is because they do move, but at scales much smaller than you. Do the Brownian motion experiment.
I never made any such claim, nor did I imply that. Strawman argument.
> The models don't have any significance beyond this bit or maybe two bits if you try to be generous about their abysmal performance regarding temperatures.
What do you mean by this? Many of the models fit the warming in the recent past quite well. This process is called hindcasting.
Again I understand the mechanism, but I still claim it's not enough to wave your hands and tell the story, calculations matter, and in this case, the quality of calculations is extremely important. You are used to astrophysics where the standard is simply much higher, and you project that onto climate science.
There are no error boundaries or even attempt at giving meaningful estimation of the error in these calculations, in fact, the various models disagree quite wildly in the sense that after accounting for variation between models, you're left with barely a weak directional claim.
There's also a significance difference between predicting global climate, and estimating with accuracy the CO2 forcing. While the global temperature is at least measurable, nobody has any way to test CO2 forcing meaningfully. Which is the entire claim.
The reason for the decision to move trillions of dollars is the prediction about CO2 forcing, but if it is wrong and we're going to rely on "renewable energy" a.k.a. wind and sun when we are currently forecasting they are going to be unreliable, that's suicide. You can even worry about whether it is the correct decision even if the entire uncertainty was geopolitics by the way. In fact, just the unpredictability of China alone is enough to put the entire policy of the west in huge doubt, but that's something else.
> This is just you repeating what you said before. The code quality is not relevant unless you point out a bug.
I literally just pointed out several bugs. These things are not constant, they depend on these parameters, you're going to accumulate huge errors if you don't take them into account, and even worse, you're going to completely miscalculate CO2 forcing if you have entire sections of your code which ignore CO2 forcing (by having "constants" that aren't constants at all but depend on CO2).
And again, you're projecting from a real science (astrophysics) where you can point your telescope anywhere you wish and collect data, which is worth millions of bits, to climate science where the only "data" is very few temperature measurements which need to be averaged to retain a very weak signal.
But on the other hand, nobody dies because they got astrophysics wrong (except in "Don't look up" movie)
It's not science. They hardly have any data points fitting their models compared to the size of these models and the variation in their results, and most importantly, they don't have any data on the central claim (CO2 forcing) at all. My argument is basically, nobody can trust the story because stories are misleading, you need a detailed calculation. Not misleading in a conspiratorial way, misleading in that this is numerical question which we humans suck at estimating narratively.
And again, those calculations could and should be much less of a dumpster fire if we're going to trust the future of humanity with them. Another example of "simplifying assumptions" blowing up in the face of the economy was 1987 stock crash where "simplifying assumptions" in modelling option prices blew up in everyone's faces and led to multi year recession. And another "simplifying assumption" in the coronavirus response led by misleading infection models and proceeding ahead out of pure cognitive dissonance. I'm sure the climate modelers are doing the best they can, but the best they can is not enough.
This dishonesty about the certainty of models, which usually results from a broken telephone where the honestly and articulated science claims are transformed into propaganda that misleads even the leaders is a bigger problem than what these models claim to solve.
If this blows in everyone's faces and "moving to renewables" turns out to be a complete disaster, they will be hanging scientists in the streets and I won't blame them. Everyone's maximizing for the "scientists were extremely accurate in their predictions and we listened to them and got it right" scenario and it's because in everyone's mind the probability the scientists are right is like 90% when in reality it's more likely 10%.
I don't want to convince you it's wrong. I want to convince you it's very non-trivial calculation to understand whether the problem is CO2, that framing it as "scientists always knew that and it's basic physics" is extremely misleading about the certainty, and that the narrativistic mindset is extremely dangerous.
I vouched for your comment just to tell you you're probably shadow banned, and I thought you would want to know.
(I didn't do it, it was probably done long time ago by a moderator).
I just feel bad looking at someone who doesn't know he's wasting time writing things nobody will see. Even if he only snarkly disagrees with me.
Also, if you engaged seriously, maybe they wouldn't ban you in the first place. I just don't believe in ignoring people who are wrong, only in correcting them.
After how long? A half-life of a decade, as I understand it? Not exactly the order of magnitude of luxury time we have to spare.
> Even if it did increase warming more than CO2
"Even if it did" is strange wording for an established fact. Do you write "even if the sky was blue"?
> once methane emissions reach a steady level, reducing methane emissions won't change a thing
It's kind of really, really important how high that "steady level" is and how fast we'd reach it though, no? We're not just worried about life 1,000 years from now. We're worried about life 20 years from now.
> The narrative is extremely misleading.
I find this statement strange after reading your comment.