So, redrawing your path by your method, if we remove ALL of the Atmospheric Methane today, we would be reducing GHG concentrations by about 160ppm CO2 equivalent, which takes the overall CO2 concentrations to less than that of pre-industrial levels(280ppm), 260ppm.
This negates your conclusion that we would hardly observe ANY difference.
If we remove literally all of the Methane today, we would have solved Global warming from the perspective of concentration of Green House gases and will just have to wait and watch for the Global Temperatures to catch up (meaning they will go down).
2nd para beneath the side heading: "Are there alternatives to the 100-year GWP for comparing GHGs?"
GWP calculations has been an active area of research for a long time.
For instance, if you look up the table beneath the VALUES side-heading in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_potential, you would notice that from 1995IPCC to the recent one, Scientists are getting more and more closer to ~80 GWP.
I'm not going to get in to a link war. All I'd ask is: in your personal experience, what have you observed? Are the seas higher than when you were a child? Are you struggling to breathe for all the C02?!? Stripping away the news coverage, what real life effects have you experienced personally?
Unfortunately, I'm not prepared to trust what I think are politicised governance authorities. At least not if they go against or do not cohere with my personal experience.
You are missing the forest for the trees. This is 20 years ago, and Al Gore was (even then) not a leading climate activist nor a climate scientist. Our knowledge of both the nature and the scope of the climate disaster has change in the meantime. Heck, we used to call it the greenhouse effect or global warming back then. Since then we’ve gotten a better understanding and are able to make better predictions and construct better policy to tackle it. Saying: “Al Gore was wrong about prediction A and B”, reminds me of creationists saying: “Evolution is wrong because Charles Darwin said the origin of organism A was environmental condition B, when in fact it wasn’t”.
I really don’t even believe Al Gore would have saved us from the Climate Disaster. I’m guessing he would have had a similar success as Obama giving health care for all.
The point is that Al Gore could run on an anti-climate change platform with the Democratic party 20 years ago. Today even a train-loving Biden is hard against investing in the green infrastructure we needed 20 years ago, even though the majority of his voters desperately want it.
The crux of my frustration is that 20 years ago there was a political will to do something about this, while now—as the west coast is literally on fire, the gulf states are being bombarded with unprecedented hurricanes and the east coast just lived through horrible heat waves—solving the climate crisis is a hard problem because politicians are unwilling to take the necessary actions.
> we used to call it the greenhouse effect or global warming back then.
And before that we were going to have a mini ice age...
Also, can I say I find it odd when people talk using the pronoun 'we'. The Queen does that when she talks about her country. That's called the royal 'we'.
What global warming effect can you say you've witnessed? I don't think I can say I've noticed a single thing. Nothing. Some warm summers some cold winters - ie weather. As a cyclist it seems the quality of air has improved and I'm noticing more birds. So 20+ years of talk and fear, and there's nothing to see?
I'm at the point where I see that all that fear serves a purpose in its own right. I don't think the rhetoric matches the reality. But putting people in a state of fear that they are also powerless to address does serve a purpose. The purpose is that it supports government. It supports global governance too. Government plays up a problem that only it can solve, and it can only solve that problem by reducing the freedoms of the people it governs. So less freedom of travel, closer monitoring, etc. For me, it's one of the justifications given for what is shaping up to be a technocratic hell. And technologists are unwittingly building the infrastructure.
What I see with Al Gore is, on the one side - a self-serving politician, happy to talk up the importance of governance when he is a member of the governing class, and on the other - a salesman doing a sales job given he is invested in green energies.
Let me get this straight. Your saying there is a conspiracy to fear monger the population with prediction of climate disaster so that we will agree on mass surveillance and to losing other freedoms.
While at the same time we have already had mass surveillance and travel restrictions imposed on us from the global war on terror (started under George Bush a year after winning the election against Al Gore), while not having any enforced international carbon reduction treaty all the while global carbon emission keeps expanding out of control.
If this was a true conspiracy so far they’ve done a very poor job with it for the past 20 years, and I say you have nothing to worry about.
I'm saying it is a long running conspiracy. We lost freedoms with the global war on terror, we have lost freedoms since then, we are going to lose more freedoms in the very near future. I can see the direction we are heading. And no, I'm not cheering it on as you seem to be.
> If this was a true conspiracy so far they’ve done a very poor job with it for the past 20 years.
What's poor about their job? I think they have done an excellent job. Most people defer to experts over their own experience. Imagine, one's own experience not carrying any weight with one's own beliefs! So, they have done an excellent job.
I think it's likely that OP was genuine and not snarky, Mr.Dang.
As in, since Musk is known to not be 'punctual' as he himself has said in his presentations, since he is known to not have these two in sync 1. Announcement of products with production dates 2. Actual product market release dates, OP may have meant he is surprised Musk seem to be rushing with Neuralink and not delaying as seem to be the case with his other companies.
I'm not sure of Human societies operating 'just fine' with the risk of flu. We seem to operate just fine NOW because we make vaccines for the flu every year, and we have several years of experience in terms of Herd Immunity and Medical assistance.
We also do not have medical personnel dying in hundreds from flu every year as they catch it in line of service.
And the baseline of flu u refer to DID NOT HELP much with predicting or managing clots in almost every major organ when it comes to COVID.
Sure, we have blood thinners etc. But when u hear from frontline workers in hospitals, the situation with clots is pretty dire.
And this is a much bigger deal and the overlap with flu is very little, even in patients tht may seem to have recovered frm Covid.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/14/health/coronavirus-stroke...
Influenza vaccines only started to become available in the 1940s. Are you claiming that human society didn't operate before that?
Influenza also increases the risk of blood clots and ischemia. So SARS-CoV-2 is nothing new in that regard, although the effects appear to be more severe.
I'm claiming the high death toll u seem to think of when talking of Flu fatalities ain't that high.
And I provided some evidence for it.
I'm hoping people will not underestimate how serious Covid19 is by drawing parallels to THE NUMBER of yearly Flu fatalities, coz the number of flu fatalities are much less compared to what gets reported every year.
Thts what the SciAm link I provided talks about.
Societies operated WITH a lot of Caution and Precautions in place before the vaccines.
They still operate with caution for flu DESPITE vaccines as they do not provide complete immunity.
Look at how people celebrate elimination of Wild polio in Africa! It came AFTER several decades of human suffering and wide ranging precautions.
And the level of caution changes depending on the local medical infrastructure, dynamics of the spread, demographics, and the specific knowledge we have about the disease in question.
I also claimed that WE HAVE SOME IDEA on how to deal with blood clotting wen it comes to Flu. Your link itself shows that out right "Emperic Anticoagulation decreases VTE"
But we are not there yet, when it comes to Covid19.
We have people dying from strokes AFTER they were thought to have recovered from Covid. And these aren't necessarily 'edge cases' that arise from the tail end of large numbers of patients during a pandemic.
These are most likely due to absence of knowledge,data and insights into managing a novel disease. Just read through the NYTimes article. It's very detailed and specific about how we are falling short NOW in dealing with strokes and clots.
The relationship between soot aerosol and warming is complex.
Black Soot may dim the sunlight,but may increase the warming by warming the snow.
"A new study found that emissions of soot, or black carbon, alters the way sunlight reflects off snow and may be responsible for as much as 25 percent of observed global warming over the past century."
The complete details on the pathophysiology of the disease are far from known yet.
For instance
"The death of a five-year-old boy in New York of inflammatory complications possibly linked to Covid-19 has prompted Andrew Cuomo, the state’s governor, to warn of “an entirely different chapter” of a disease that had been believed to cause only mild symptoms in children."
"Cuomo later tweeted that there have been 73 reported cases in New York of children falling severely ill with a toxic shock-like reaction that displays symptoms similar to Kawasaki disease."
"Stay home, stay safe" only works if the other people in your home stay home too. It's not surprising people get infected indoors - one sick person in a household, office building, or restaurant will infect those nearby. You're far less likely to get it from a random passerby on the sidewalk, as your exposure time is much more limited.
The issue with this approach is, it will not be possible to control the quantity or 'Infectious dose', which in the case of Covid19, may or may not affect how severely a person gets ill after infection.
Not exactly.
Some hundreds of patients were thought to have gotten rid of the virus during hospital stay and treatment and sent home after confirming through RT-PCR tests. But they were found to be covid+ve afterwards. Studies indicated that the +ve tests were 'likely' from the genetic material that lingered from the first infection and not from re-infection.
https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-reinfections-were-fa...
However, they do not declare that you cannot get re-infected two months down the line or two years down the line. We don't have that information about immunity yet.
"The great bulk of evidence' in this situation would mean the data on the duration of presence of Neutralizing antibodies in the blood stream of people who got rid of the virus.
But this data is not there yet,as I said before.
Scientists are currently working to figure out how long the antibodies stay in the body and if they are potent enough to fight re-infections.
There is 'no great bulk of evidence' yet. Unless I'm wrong, and I hope I am.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
"For any country contemplating these issues, another crucial question is how solid is the assumption that antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 spike protein equate to functional protection?Furthermore, if presence of these antibodies is protective, how can it be decided what proportion of the population requires these antibodies to mitigate subsequent waves of cases of COVID-19?"
"Furthermore, studies in COVID-19 show that 10–20% of symptomatically infected people have little or no detectable antibody."
We need more data, which I understand scientists all over the world are working relentlessly to deliver, to believe that 'you won't reinfect once you get it'
Most antibodies to viruses don't last forever, the question is not if you can get COVID19 twice (you almost surely can) but how long in-between are you protected.
And the evidence is unclear, and in some cases worrying:
As @tpnCC and @seppin said, there is significant clinical & scientific uncertainty about covid19 antibody response and duration, partly because there hasn't been enough time to collect the relevant data (for covid19) and partly because of prior resarch indicating reduced human antibody response to SARS.
Lower in this thread I commented about a 2011 resarch paper that demonstrated anti-SARS antibody levels fell by half 2 years postinfection and were undetectable 6 years postinfection in 21 of 23 SARS patients tested.
There is a big problem with optimistically assuming immune systems will respond like SARS even, because we know in general terms the more severe the symptoms the longer the immunity lasts, but wait ... huge huge numbers of people with Covid-19 are asymptotic, that is not the cases with it’s SARS and MERS relatives! wake up people, herd immunity is delusional and dangerous. more likely is very short immunity, just like the other 4 Corona family virus which cause many of our common colds, high asymptotic rates, and reinfect us very very frequently and NOT due to mutations!
If those SARS numbers are in the same vein as what is true for COVID19, the only answer is a vaccine. Otherwise our current state of affairs is the new normal for the foreseeable future.
It's estimated that ~14% of common cold cases are caused by coronaviruses (HCoV-OC43, HCoV-229E, HCoV-NL63)... so although it seems particularly difficult, if we do manage to discover how to develop effective vaccines against Covid19, perhaps the silver lining is that vaccines against the related viruses responsible for a significant fraction of the common cold will be in reach.
In that case COVID19 will play out like the 1918 flu, it will hit in waves that only mass quarantine will help mitigate, until enough immunity is reached. Likely 18 months - 2 years.
Just to spell it out: herd immunity depends on sustained immunity postinfection. It seems possible, perhaps probable, that covid19 "immunity" may have an unusually short duration or attenuated response, resulting in an effective herd population that is a fraction of the theoretical herd population. I.e. if 60% of Americans have been infected and recovered after 12 months, but antibody levels drop 25% after 12 months, the true number of immune americans comprising the herd will be less than 60%.
If so, we may need to consider pursuing a relatively slow and steady relaxation of lockdown to tune the rate of new infections such that herd immunity is kept as stable as possible - i.e. flatten curve into truly flat-but-nonzero line
