By Paul Homewood
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-enosystem-60203683
The BBC article on methane makes an interesting claim:
One Last year’s IPCC study suggest that 30-50% of the current increase in temperature is due to methane.
The study, known as AR6, estimates that increased methane in the atmosphere has contributed 0.5C to global warming since 1850-1900:
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/
Given that even the IPCC reports have accepted that some of the warming since the 19th century is caused by nature, that doesn’t leave much but could be attributed to CO2.
Even excluding those natural factors, the aerosol lattice is only about 0.6C of man-made warming, once methane is removed from the equation:
Therefore, it seems that CO2 is a minor issue.
Methane, is 84 times as strong as one GHG per unit of CO2, has an extremely short lifespan, halving in the atmosphere every decade.
Therefore, we do not need to start drastically reducing emissions now. Just maintaining current emissions would mean that concentrations in the atmosphere would level off quickly:
Indeed, if current efforts to cut methane are successful, we will likely see rapid global cooling, assuming of course the IPCC calculations are correct.
Given the reaction of world leaders and scientists in the 1970s after three decades of global cooling, that might not be a smart idea at all!
FOOT
I should point out that some scientists believe that methane is hardly relevant as a greenhouse gas, because its emission spectrum is already filled with water vapor.
See here.
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