> Methane emissions have a much shorter residency time in the atmosphere than carbon. I
Except...methane has a shorter residency time is due to it turning into CO2 at a 7 year half-life, right?
I keep hearing this from people who seemingly know a lot more than me about this stuff, and yet prima facie, it seems entirely wrong. It sounds equivalent to "we cause 7X the amount of short-term greenhouse effect, but eventually it drops down to 1X, and that's better than 1X from the get-go".
Does it turn into significantly less amount of CO2? How much less? If you can clear it up for me, I'd honestly really appreciate it.
To elaborate a bit, an atom of carbon in CH4 is around 100x as bad as an atom of carbon in CO2; CH4 is primarily and quickly removed by breaking down into CO2. But the number of carbon atoms we release into the atmosphere as CH4 is much, much less than the number of carbon atoms we release into the atmosphere of CO2. We only care about CH4 because it's 100x as powerful a greenhouse gas as CO2. If we released the methane carbon directly as CO2 carbon, it'd be a measurable amount but dwarfed by other sources.
> But the number of carbon atoms we release into the atmosphere as CH4 is much, much less than the number of carbon atoms we release into the atmosphere of CO2
Parent's point is that we don't actually know how much methane is released into the atmosphere due to natural gas fracking.
Except...methane has a shorter residency time is due to it turning into CO2 at a 7 year half-life, right? I keep hearing this from people who seemingly know a lot more than me about this stuff, and yet prima facie, it seems entirely wrong. It sounds equivalent to "we cause 7X the amount of short-term greenhouse effect, but eventually it drops down to 1X, and that's better than 1X from the get-go".
Does it turn into significantly less amount of CO2? How much less? If you can clear it up for me, I'd honestly really appreciate it.