The danger of overvaluing methane’s influence on future climate change
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In this paper, the authors show the temperature changes that result from exchanging CO2 for CH4 using a variety of commonly suggested metrics to illustrate the trade-offs involved in potential carbon trading mechanisms that place a high value on CH4 emissions.Abstract:
Minimizing the future impacts of climate change requires reducing the greenhouse gas (GHG) load in the atmosphere. Anthropogenic emissions include many types of GHG’s as well as particulates such as black carbon and sulfate aerosols, each of which has a different effect on the atmosphere, and a different atmospheric lifetime. Several recent studies have advocated for the importance of short timescales when comparing the climate impact of different climate pollutants, placing a high relative value on short-lived pollutants, such as methane (CH4) and black carbon (BC) versus carbon dioxide (CO2). These studies have generated confusion over how to value changes in temperature that occur over short versus long timescales. We show the temperature changes that result from exchanging CO2 for CH4 using a variety of commonly suggested metrics to illustrate the trade-offs involved in potential carbon trading mechanisms that place a high value on CH4 emissions. Reducing CH4 emissions today would lead to a climate cooling of approximately ~0.5 °C, but this value will not change greatly if we delay reducing CH4 emissions by years or decades. This is not true for CO2, for which the climate is influenced by cumulative emissions. Any delay in reducing CO2 emissions is likely to lead to higher cumulative emissions, and more warming. The exact warming resulting from this delay depends on the trajectory of future CO2 emissions but using one business-as usual-projection we estimate an increase of 3/4 °C for every 15-year delay in CO2 mitigation. Overvaluing the influence of CH4 emissions on climate could easily result in our “locking” the earth into a warmer temperature trajectory, one that is temporarily masked by the short-term cooling effects of the CH4 reductions, but then persists for many generations.read more
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Air quality and climate connections.
TL;DR: Air pollutant controls on CH4, a potent GHG and precursor to global O3 levels, and on sources with high black carbon (BC) to organic carbon (OC) ratios could offset near-term warming induced by SO2 emission reductions, while reducing global background O3 and regionally high levels of PM.
Future CO2 Emissions and Climate Change from Existing Energy Infrastructure
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Risks and risk governance in unconventional shale gas development.
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Short-Lived Climate Pollution
TL;DR: A re-examination of the issues shows that the benefits of early SLCP mitigation have been greatly exaggerated, largely because of inadequacies in the methodologies used to compare the climate effects of short-lived substances with those of CO2 as discussed by the authors.
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Disentangling the effects of CO2 and short-lived climate forcer mitigation.
Joeri Rogelj,Michiel Schaeffer,Malte Meinshausen,Drew Shindell,William Hare,Zbigniew Klimont,Guus J. M. Velders,Markus Amann,Hans Joachim Schellnhuber +8 more
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Methane and the greenhouse-gas footprint of natural gas from shale formations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Simultaneously Mitigating Near-Term Climate Change and Improving Human Health and Food Security
Drew Shindell,Johan C.I. Kuylenstierna,Elisabetta Vignati,Rita Van Dingenen,Markus Amann,Zbigniew Klimont,Susan C. Anenberg,Nicholas Z. Muller,Greet Janssens-Maenhout,Frank Raes,Joel Schwartz,Greg Faluvegi,Luca Pozzoli,Kaarle Kupiainen,Lena Höglund-Isaksson,Lisa Emberson,David G. Streets,Veerabhadran Ramanathan,Kevin Hicks,N.T. Kim Oanh,George P. Milly,Martin L. Williams,Volodymyr Demkine,David Fowler +23 more
TL;DR: 14 measures targeting methane and BC emissions that reduce projected global mean warming ~0.5°C by 2050 and increases annual crop yields by 30 to 135 million metric tons due to ozone reductions in 2030 and beyond are identified.
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