Remember all that talk about methane being the scariest greenhouse gas? The claims are behind the war on meat, rice, farts, gas stoves, fracking, and just about everything else in the known universe that improves human life.
Well, except farts. They really don’t improve human life that much, unless you have gas pains. Man, it sucks when you have gas pains.
The science behind the claims that methane is a powerful greenhouse gas is pretty straightforward, if you look at only part of the science. Methane indeed traps more heat inside the atmosphere than CO2, by a wide margin. It disperses much more quickly, with a short life in the atmosphere, but if you only consider the warming impact it indeed is quite powerful.
That’s the reasoning behind the war on gas. But…Yeah, well, there is a huge problem with that claim. While technically true in some abstract sense, it is much less true when you look at all the effects methane in the atmosphere has on global temperatures. In other words, it is the sort of claim that relies upon your ignorance of the multiple effects of methane gas in the atmosphere–some of which are known widely, and many of which even climate “scientists” didn’t know when they made their wild claims about doom from leaking natural gas.
New research shows that methane is still a powerful greenhouse gas, but nothing like what is claimed regularly.
This is the sort of thing that happens all the time in climate research, where variables are viewed and modeled in isolation based upon a limited set of data, and then the “scientists” extrapolate the heck out of the limited data and come up with models that are, frankly, ridiculous.
Then they pick the most extreme outcomes from models with the worst outcomes, and call it “settled science.” It is exactly the sort of thing you see in nutrition research, for example. Creating simplistic models from limited data interpreting complex and highly interdependent systems as if they mirror the falling of a bowling ball and a feather in a vacuum.
And the results, as you can see in the real world, are quite different. Bowling balls and feathers fall at the same rate in a vacuum, but once you introduce the atmosphere a feather can “fall upwards” on a breeze while the bowling ball crashes down as predicted.
The research in question here reveals the complexity of reality: methane may trap heat, but it also prevents energy from reaching the earth. To some extent, the two effects cancel each other out.Methane is a greenhouse gas with dual personalities. It heats Earth’s atmosphere 28 times as potently as carbon dioxide, gram for gram. But its absorption of the sun’s radiation high in the atmosphere also alters cloud patterns — casting a bit of shadow on its warming effect.
So rather than adding even more thermal energy to the atmosphere, as previously thought, methane’s solar absorption sets off a cascade of events that reduces its overall warming effect by about 30 percent, researchers report March 16 in Nature Geoscience.The result is “counterintuitive,” says climate scientist Robert Allen of the University of California, Riverside. It happens because of the way that methane’s shortwave absorbance affects clouds in different layers of the atmosphere, Allen and colleagues’ simulations suggest.
When methane absorbs shortwave radiation in the middle and upper troposphere, above about three kilometers, it further warms the air — leading to fewer clouds in that upper layer. And because methane absorbs shortwave radiation high up, less of that radiation penetrates down to the lower troposphere. This actually cools the lower troposphere, leading to more clouds in that layer.
These thicker low-level clouds reflect more of the sun’s shortwave radiation back out to space — meaning that less of this solar radiation reaches Earth’s surface, to be converted into longwave radiation.
