this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2024
177 points (98.9% liked)

Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.

5257 readers
753 users here now

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.

Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:

Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
silence7@slrpnk.net
177
Satellite to ‘name and shame’ worst oil and gas methane polluters (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by silence7@slrpnk.net to c/climate@slrpnk.net
13 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I'll note that while methane is responsible for something like 30% of the observed warming oil and gas leaks are only part of that.

Edit: Washington Post coverage

Edit: New York Times coverage

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Darkard@lemmy.world 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

It's just going to be a map of the most industrialised countries and areas within those countries? Is it going to tell us anything we don't already know?

If these polluters had any shame they would have already done something about it.

[–] silence7@slrpnk.net 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

It's going to provide the locations and rate of leak for major new emissions sources, to a pixel size of 100m x 400m, and detect those leaks within 95 minutes. That's enough to find major new leaks quickly and enable a response to them.

In the US, a new methane emissions tax which just went into effect will provide a powerful incentive for infrastructure owners to fix big leaks like this.

[–] MrMakabar@slrpnk.net 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

There are a lot of natural sources of methane and the biggest human sources are oil and gas wells and some coal mines. So Europe for example tends to have low methane leakage. However that is using the current satellites, which are not able to detect smaller emission sources.

The other really big one are methane deposits in permafrost and the ocean depths, which could be released, when we reach certain temperature increases. Especially permafrost starts to release methane today, which is one of the earliest tipping points. So we really want to know when that starts to happen.

EDIT: Also methane does not stay in the atmosphere too long. So it lowering emissions would decrease temperatures relatively quickly.