I doubt any of these people have ever been to the Caucasus. I can assure you that methane literally just naturally comes out of the ground in Baku. There is literally an ancient “Temple of Fire” that burns a natural methane seep.
Yes the Soviet oil industry has a bad and dirty legacy of pollution, but come on. Of course we should do our best to curtail human made methane leaks, but perspective is needed.
While I agree with your main point, I also don't think that million deaths should be taken at face value. Ground-level ozone is not global, it is regional. It requires the right combination of emissions and weather conditions to form. Also, if wind patterns do not transport methane emissions to urban areas before they dissipate, those emissions will not produce ozone and deaths. Even getting a reasonable estimate of the impact here is a hard problem. And because of the bias toward climate issues you rightly lament, I doubt the work has been done.
Agree. Note there is no attribution to support the assertion that this many deaths are the result of methane. But it’s a fossil fuel, so it most certainly must be characterized as evil, and evil consequences must be attributed to it.
Perhaps what they meant to say is that death from methane warming will soon become much higher than a million a year, unless cooling action is taken. Methane causes about a third of warming forcing, as well as being a major feedback such as in permafrost melt. With the great difficulty of cutting methane emissions, these observations can be taken to justify immediate steps to rebrighten the planet with sunlight reflection methods.
Thanks Quico, I am very impressed by your analysis overall. I have brought your blog to the attention of colleagues and hope we can discuss your work in more detail. On methane, if we think about the effects of warming - including sea level rise, extreme weather and systemic disruptions, as well as biodiversity loss - we can see its growth contributes to high risk of conflict arising from climate refugees and economic and social disruption. If methane is responsible for a quarter of warming impact, we can attribute a high level of likely avoidable mortality to failure to curb methane growth. A precautionary approach looks at worse case scenarios. With climate change the fragility and sensitivity of our planet makes those 'fat tail' outcomes something that deserves much more attention, with disruptive heat having cascading impacts if not rapidly curtailed. The sheer difficulty of removing methane and CO2 means direct climate cooling through sunlight reflection methods needs to become the urgent priority.
I can't argue with anything in this comment. Decision-making under deep uncertainty is a nightmare — how do you weigh different outcomes with probabilities you can't really quantify? And what is the correct discount rate to apply to deaths in the deep future? If you conclude higher forcing now is likely to cause 120 million excess deaths in 100 years time, is that better or worse than 1 million deaths per year for 100 years?
I don't know!! I don't even know how to think about it...
A further issue is food. Climate change presents risks to agricultural productivity. If weather impacts on farming systems lead to collapse of food security, the death rate may not just be a problem for the deep future but could arise sooner than we expect.
I doubt any of these people have ever been to the Caucasus. I can assure you that methane literally just naturally comes out of the ground in Baku. There is literally an ancient “Temple of Fire” that burns a natural methane seep.
Yes the Soviet oil industry has a bad and dirty legacy of pollution, but come on. Of course we should do our best to curtail human made methane leaks, but perspective is needed.
While I agree with your main point, I also don't think that million deaths should be taken at face value. Ground-level ozone is not global, it is regional. It requires the right combination of emissions and weather conditions to form. Also, if wind patterns do not transport methane emissions to urban areas before they dissipate, those emissions will not produce ozone and deaths. Even getting a reasonable estimate of the impact here is a hard problem. And because of the bias toward climate issues you rightly lament, I doubt the work has been done.
Agree. Note there is no attribution to support the assertion that this many deaths are the result of methane. But it’s a fossil fuel, so it most certainly must be characterized as evil, and evil consequences must be attributed to it.
Perhaps what they meant to say is that death from methane warming will soon become much higher than a million a year, unless cooling action is taken. Methane causes about a third of warming forcing, as well as being a major feedback such as in permafrost melt. With the great difficulty of cutting methane emissions, these observations can be taken to justify immediate steps to rebrighten the planet with sunlight reflection methods.
Well maybe, but I cannot imagine the assumptions you'd have to make to believe this is true. A million deaths a year is a huge huge number.
It is a big world. Probably a million people a year are dying NOW from CC-induced heat.
This can't be the reason, though. Research shows pretty emphatically excess cold kills many more people than excess heat.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/interactive/2023/hot-cold-extreme-temperature-deaths/
Thanks Quico, I am very impressed by your analysis overall. I have brought your blog to the attention of colleagues and hope we can discuss your work in more detail. On methane, if we think about the effects of warming - including sea level rise, extreme weather and systemic disruptions, as well as biodiversity loss - we can see its growth contributes to high risk of conflict arising from climate refugees and economic and social disruption. If methane is responsible for a quarter of warming impact, we can attribute a high level of likely avoidable mortality to failure to curb methane growth. A precautionary approach looks at worse case scenarios. With climate change the fragility and sensitivity of our planet makes those 'fat tail' outcomes something that deserves much more attention, with disruptive heat having cascading impacts if not rapidly curtailed. The sheer difficulty of removing methane and CO2 means direct climate cooling through sunlight reflection methods needs to become the urgent priority.
Thanks!
I can't argue with anything in this comment. Decision-making under deep uncertainty is a nightmare — how do you weigh different outcomes with probabilities you can't really quantify? And what is the correct discount rate to apply to deaths in the deep future? If you conclude higher forcing now is likely to cause 120 million excess deaths in 100 years time, is that better or worse than 1 million deaths per year for 100 years?
I don't know!! I don't even know how to think about it...
A further issue is food. Climate change presents risks to agricultural productivity. If weather impacts on farming systems lead to collapse of food security, the death rate may not just be a problem for the deep future but could arise sooner than we expect.