International Events VII- Afghan Catastrophe

[Zorral]

Also remote workers --

https://slate.com/technology/2021/11/digital-nomad-mexico-city.html

"Mexico City’s Remote Worker Problem"

Among the problems:

Quote

 

Raquel Ramírez is the host of the podcast CDMX Expats, on which she talks to international residents of Mexico City. When she asked a recent guest about his favorite memory of living in Mexico’s capital, he was quick to answer. “We went to one of the secret parties, as COVID was quite a bit worse at that point. I met some random people, and then I just followed them the entire night as we hop from club or party to party, maybe four to six, maybe seven different places,” he said. (In the same interview, he also talked about “taking some acid” while touring the Teotihuacan pyramids.)

It was just another example of one of Mexico City’s new international guests misbehaving during the pandemic. Others have ignored guidelines for indoor capacity restrictions, or even failed to wear masks where required. “Dear guests, we are genuinely happy you’re vaccinated. Please consider many of us are not,” reads an English-language poster hanging near the park Parque México in Condesa, a well-visited neighborhood in Mexico City. Another sign shows a lucha libre–style encounter between a face mask and a maskless person. These and other creative posters, some written in English and some in Spanish, are made by the Good Guest Collective, an organization composed of local and foreign residents of the city. The collective was a response to the uptick in international visitors, many of whom have been disrespectful of local norms—a phenomenon the pandemic didn’t cause but has certainly exacerbated. ....

... this disparity is already affecting the local population, particularly through the housing market. As is common in popular tourist destinations around the world, the demand for Airbnbs and other short-term rentals has spurred the construction of new apartment buildings that cater to tourists and short-term residents. Despite costing more, long-term Airbnbs are particularly attractive to remote workers because they can pay with foreign bank accounts, don’t have to jump through bureaucratic hoops and paperwork, and arrive to furnished apartments with the utilities taken care of. ....

 

Which reminds me; last night the owner-operator of our local told us that next Halloween he's closing the restaurant at 6 PM. "These people who come here for the parade are trashy, just trash.  I shouldn't need to put up with this.  I had to throw out two different tables last night, they were so bad.  There were so many others I wished to throw out too."  This is one night here, of 400,000 non-residents demanding space in a neighborhood that certainly hasn't got space of any kind for that many -- and then their behavior, well, as R said, "Trash."  Abusive, refusal to behave by social norms, much less city mandated ones.  R closed earl too, because he, his wife and staff were worn to shreds by these abusive jerkwaddies.  "Then I can't sleep when home because I'm so upset from everything I had to deal with all day and last night."

But then, as we know, as even tv such as Succession shows us, those sorts don't give a shyte either how they are perceived by Not-Them.  We simply don't register as existing, unless something get through, then they use violence as with the flight attendant last week on American Airlines, who a first class passenger hit in the face with his fist, because she inadvertently bumped him.  She's in hospital with broken bones and a concussion.  Shades of the middle ages.

 

[The Anti-Targ]

Meanwhile, the scientific community and CoP26 are starting to recognise that the problem with methane is not cows and sheep after all (something I have been saying for a while). Methane emissions only need to be cut by 30% to have the desired effect for this gas, and the industrial (mostly fossil fuel) and human waste sectors are responsible for 55% of all anthropogenic methane emissions. Emissions reductions can be achieved almost entirely from these sectors, which has the added benefit in the case of the fossil fuel sector (35% of all methane emissions) of also not contributing to a permanent elevation of CO2.

https://public.wmo.int/en/media/news/global-methane-assessment-released

Quote

The assessment identifies measures that specifically target methane emission. By implementing these readily available solutions methane emissions can be reduced by 30 per cent by 2030. Most are in the fossil fuel sector where it is relatively easily to locate and fix methane leaks and reduce venting. There are also targeted measures that can be used in the waste and agriculture sectors.

The problem of climate change has been and always will be a fossil fuel issue. Cows and sheep are largely a red herring used to distract policy-makers from dealing with the real problem. There are other, local environmental problems with cattle and sheep farming which are important to deal with, especially water use, waterway quality and soil health, but methane related climate change is not a burden that should be placed on sheep and cattle farming to the degree that people with vested interests and hidden agendas try to make out.

[Zorral]

20 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

The problem of climate change has been and always will be a fossil fuel issue. Cows and sheep are largely a red herring used to distract policy-makers from dealing with the real problem.

That's what I've believed too, all along.  Mostly because growing up with those animals.  If their emissions were that lethal, they'd all have died in the barn.

[Rippounet]

11 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Methane emissions only need to be cut by 30% to have the desired effect for this gas,

Where is this information from? I don't think this is accurate.

The possibility of "easily" cutting methane emissions by 30% seems to come from a recent United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) report called "Global Methane Assessment: Benefits and Costs of Mitigating Methane Emissions" and easy to find online. On page 9 it says this:

Quote

According to scenarios analysed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), global methane emissions must be reduced by between 40–45 per cent by 2030 to achieve least cost-pathways that limit global warming to 1.5° C this century, alongside substantial simultaneous reductions of all climate forcers including carbon dioxide and short-lived climate pollutants. (Section 4.1)

 

[IheartIheartTesla]

I'd agree that methane leaks are underappreciated (and underreported ) aspect of climate change. We have detectors that can detect ppb of methane, so the technology exists even to cap smaller leaks, but the big companies will have the biggest leaks.

To me however, the GWP of methane is the more interesting question (28 for a 100-year horizon, but 86 for a 20-year horizon). Which one is the better to choose? That will decide the relative importance of methane and capping it.

[Zorral]

But it isn't cows!  Again, in closed cow barn in winter nights, the cows contentedly lay in the straw and chewed their cuds.  But if one ran the tractor and truck with the barn closed up, the cows would die.  One stupid neighbor actually did that, and lost all of his herd.

 

[IheartIheartTesla]

I'm not sure what the relative toxicity of methane and carbon monoxide has to do with the GWPs of methane and carbon dioxide. You can have enteric fermentation of cows that results in significant methane emissions without their reaching indoor concentrations high enough to be toxic (and note that methane isnt particularly toxic)

 

[Padraig]

6 hours ago, IheartIheartTesla said:

To me however, the GWP of methane is the more interesting question (28 for a 100-year horizon, but 86 for a 20-year horizon).

Fascinating. I didn't know that.

Agriculture is the biggest cause of greenhouse gas emissions in Ireland (33%).   Most of that is methane.  I wonder do they weight it by GWP?   I've never seen that factored in anyhow.

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/environment/cutting-methane-emissions-most-impactful-way-to-limit-climate-change-1.4693169

The above article talks about methane.

Quote

Methane is responsible for around 30 per cent of the global rise in temperatures to date, it confirms. Rapid steps to tackle methane emissions from oil, gas and coal operations would have immediate impacts because of the potent effect of methane on global warming and large scope for cost-effective actions, the report concludes.

It outlines pathways to curtailing methane emissions from fossil fuel operations with a view to a 75 per cent cut by 2030. The largest source of global methane emissions from human activities is agriculture, closely followed by the energy sector, which includes emissions from coal, oil, natural gas and biofuels. Agriculture accounts for a third of Ireland’s overall emissions; most of which are made up to methane.

 

[The Anti-Targ]

23 hours ago, Rippounet said:

Where is this information from? I don't think this is accurate.

The possibility of "easily" cutting methane emissions by 30% seems to come from a recent United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) report called "Global Methane Assessment: Benefits and Costs of Mitigating Methane Emissions" and easy to find online. On page 9 it says this:

 

OK I extrapolated from the article that 30% would be OK. But when you consider how methane operates (being a short lived gas) the effect of emission reduction is very quick compared to reduced CO2 emissions, so a 30% reduction in methane is a substantial decrease that if done relatively soon will have large influence on the contribution of methane to the warming effect. The larger point, though, is that it's all about, and has always been about fossil fuel.

10 hours ago, IheartIheartTesla said:

I'd agree that methane leaks are underappreciated (and underreported ) aspect of climate change. We have detectors that can detect ppb of methane, so the technology exists even to cap smaller leaks, but the big companies will have the biggest leaks.

To me however, the GWP of methane is the more interesting question (28 for a 100-year horizon, but 86 for a 20-year horizon). Which one is the better to choose? That will decide the relative importance of methane and capping it.

There are 2 GWPs, GWP100 and GWP*. GWP* is a more recent formulation and it paints quite a different picture for methane, and in particular is suggests the effect of ruminant methane is much smaller than people have made out.

7 hours ago, Zorral said:

But it isn't cows!  Again, in closed cow barn in winter nights, the cows contentedly lay in the straw and chewed their cuds.  But if one ran the tractor and truck with the barn closed up, the cows would die.  One stupid neighbor actually did that, and lost all of his herd.

 

The amount of methane cows produce over the course of a night is very small compared to an ICE engine running continuously. And of course an ICE engine is not just spewing CO2, it is also consuming O2 and as @IheartTesla said there is also CO. Methane and CO2 really mostly suffocate you as O2 concentrations fall and concentrations of those gases rise. CO is actually toxic and will kill you no matter how much O2 there is available to breathe.

 

4 hours ago, Padraig said:

Fascinating. I didn't know that.

Agriculture is the biggest cause of greenhouse gas emissions in Ireland (33%).   Most of that is methane.  I wonder do they weight it by GWP?   I've never seen that factored in anyhow.

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/environment/cutting-methane-emissions-most-impactful-way-to-limit-climate-change-1.4693169

The above article talks about methane.

 

The important thing, as I've mentioned a few times in the past, is that not all methane is created equally. If you are releasing methane from long sequestered sources (oil, gas, coal AND the permafrost) then this leads to a short term warming multiplier by virtue of methane being a stronger GHG than CO2 as well as a long term increase in atmospheric carbon essentially causing a permanent warming effect. Coming from ruminants there is no long term increase in atmospheric carbon, since every atom of methane a ruminant belches up is rapidly counterbalanced by the plants the animal recently ate that produced the methane. A methane molecule replaces a CO2 molecule as the immediate effect which has a short term warming effect, but it ultimately becomes CO2 again through natural processes. Because there is no net increase in atmospheric carbon this means animal emissions have a negligible long term effect on climate change. It also has no effect at all on ocean acidification. The long term effect on climate change (and ocean acidity) is about an ever increasing amount of atmospheric carbon, and that has to be the focus of efforts to combat climate change. Too much attention, expense and effort on animal emissions is a distraction, and potentially a dangerous distraction if it takes attention and effort away from fossil fuel action.

The world is better off finding a way for farmers to go electric / biofuels for the farm equipment than doing anything about the gases the cows and sheep (and goats, and deer) produce. Research dollars directed at cows and sheep producing less methane is fine, but it should come from an "animal production efficiency" pot of money and not a "climate change research" pot of money. After all every molecule of CH4 a cow or sheep burps is an atom of carbon that is not being used to make meat, milk, wool, leather, velvet etc, so finding a way to cost effectively reduce the amount of methane an animal releases theoretically increases the animal's productivity, and if animals become more productive you need to farm fewer of them to produce the same amount of whatever it is you are producing, which has all sorts of sustainability and environmental benefits.

[Padraig]

22 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

A methane molecule replaces a CO2 molecule as the immediate effect which has a short term warming effect, but it ultimately becomes CO2 again through natural processes

Its a purely circular thing?  Plants are storing (?) the CO2, the cows convert it into methane, which is turned back into CO2 in the atmosphere?  I don't know this subject at all but given the focus on this subject in this country, i'm really surprised this hasn't been brought up.

But there is more methane in the atmosphere now than 40 years ago right?  Thus, the GWP100 being so high for methane reflects the portion of methane that isn't converted into C02?  Which is presumably a small proportion of the overall methane generated?

[The Anti-Targ]

20 minutes ago, Padraig said:

Its a purely circular thing?  Plants are storing (?) the CO2, the cows convert it into methane, which is turned back into CO2 in the atmosphere?  I don't know this subject at all but given the focus on this subject in this country, i'm really surprised this hasn't been brought up.

But there is more methane in the atmosphere now than 40 years ago right?  Thus, the GWP100 being so high for methane reflects the portion of methane that isn't converted into C02?  Which is presumably a small proportion of the overall methane generated?

For emissions from animal metabolism it is a purely circular thing. Plants "eat" CO2, animals eat the plants, animals breath out CO2 and burp up methane, plants eat the CO2 (including eventually the CO2 from methane breakdown), it is a closed system. Albeit not necessarily a steady state. If you increase the number of animals producing methane then the carbon stays in the atmosphere longer and with a greater warming effect, so the carbon cycle is longer. So reducing the number of methane producing animals (or reducing the amount of methane they produce) will shorten the cycle and have a cooling effect. The atmospheric methane cycle is well known, the increase in methane over time is about increased emissions and not about methane hanging around for longer unconverted to CO2. All methane in the atmosphere converts to CO2 with a half life that is well established.

Global warming is entirely about increasing the amount of carbon in the biosphere. Agricultural methane is contributing to global warming on the margins but that is only because fossil fuel is causing a long term increase in carbon in the biosphere. The warming influence of agricultural methane since the beginning of the industrial age is not enough, by itself, to have any meaningful effect on global temperature. But when placed on top of the fossil fuel emissions of CO2 and methane, it makes a bad situation a little bit worse. If you focus too much attention and resource on the bit that makes it a little bit worse, then you are not really addressing the bad situation to the extent that is needed. Hence well meaning people saying we need to get rid of cows and sheep are causing a major distraction, as well as unnecessary defensive intransigence from sectors that could actually be climate change allies if they were not being unfairly blamed.

[A Horse Named Stranger]

13 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

For emissions from animal metabolism it is a purely circular thing. Plants "eat" CO2, animals eat the plants, animals breath out CO2 and burp up methane, plants eat the CO2 (including eventually the CO2 from methane breakdown), it is a closed system. Albeit not necessarily a steady state. If you increase the number of animals producing methane then the carbon stays in the atmosphere longer and with a greater warming effect, so the carbon cycle is longer. So reducing the number of methane producing animals (or reducing the amount of methane they produce) will shorten the cycle and have a cooling effect. The atmospheric methane cycle is well known, the increase in methane over time is about increased emissions and not about methane hanging around for longer unconverted to CO2. All methane in the atmosphere converts to CO2 with a half life that is well established.

It's a bit more complicated than that.

I'll use cows as the livestock with the worst emissions as an example.

Cows do need to eat. Or so captain obvious told me. This where the problem starts. Mostly they are fed soy, which has to be grown somewhere. And this is where the problems get real. We arrive at the point, where the rain forest in the amazon gets cut down to grow food for cows. Yes, in theory, there's a ban on cutting down the rain forest for farmland to grow soy. In practice, the forests in Brazil gets cut down to have farmland for cows, in turn, the farmland the cows had previously been on is being reused to grow soy. So no matter how you look at it, our hunger for meat is a bigger problem, than the mere CO² cycle you described.

We are not even talking about nitritate they produce, which isn't great for the soil and freshwater in the ground.

[JGP]

yikes

 

 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

Yikes indeed, the killbots are real now. Someone go get Brannigan! 

[The Anti-Targ]

9 hours ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

It's a bit more complicated than that.

I'll use cows as the livestock with the worst emissions as an example.

Cows do need to eat. Or so captain obvious told me. This where the problem starts. Mostly they are fed soy, which has to be grown somewhere. And this is where the problems get real. We arrive at the point, where the rain forest in the amazon gets cut down to grow food for cows. Yes, in theory, there's a ban on cutting down the rain forest for farmland to grow soy. In practice, the forests in Brazil gets cut down to have farmland for cows, in turn, the farmland the cows had previously been on is being reused to grow soy. So no matter how you look at it, our hunger for meat is a bigger problem, than the mere CO² cycle you described.

We are not even talking about nitritate they produce, which isn't great for the soil and freshwater in the ground.

There are 99 problems with animal agriculture, but methane [mostly] isn't one. Don't forget those crops are also grown for pigs and chickens. When it comes to climate change, again the felling of the rain forests would not be so much of a climate change issue IF we weren't pumping so much CO2 and methane into the atmosphere from fossil fuel use. It would be a problem for many other reasons, but not so much for climate change.

[A True Kaniggit]

6 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

Yikes indeed, the killbots are real now. Someone go get Brannigan! 

When I’m in command, every mission is a suicide mission. 
 

https://youtu.be/tcvRPXB6sNc

 

[TheLastWolf]

Hmm, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-59165781

[A Horse Named Stranger]

13 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

There are 99 problems with animal agriculture, but methane [mostly] isn't one. Don't forget those crops are also grown for pigs and chickens. When it comes to climate change, again the felling of the rain forests would not be so much of a climate change issue IF we weren't pumping so much CO2 and methane into the atmosphere from fossil fuel use. It would be a problem for many other reasons, but not so much for climate change.

But we are. Just that one kg of beef is producing like 8x the emissions than a kg of pork or chicken do? In theory if we were to cut our meat consumption dramatically, we could at least iin theory start to regrow forests on quite a bit of farmland. That alone wouldn't solve the problem, esp. not overnight, since forests don't grow overnight. But that way we'd create CO2 storages, we'd cool the earth and stop desertification.

[Rippounet]

8 hours ago, TheLastWolf said:

Hmm, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-59165781

Greta is correct -of course. COP26 is a dismal failure.
At this point, even a +2°C objective seems to have been abandoned.

The question of methane emissions is a case in point. The IPCC clearly stated that reducing these emissions by 40% was the absolute minimum to remain around +1,5°C, but that's only if a host of other significant measures were taken.
What we got was a 30% cut (which is "easy" according to the UNEP report), and little else besides.

We'd all want for our world leaders to be serious about this, but they're really not. What they're doing is picking the low-hanging fruits and then presenting such meagre agreements as significant victories. Or perhaps it's the media not doing their job properly (?). At any rate, Greta's right to present it as a disaster. That it is.

I guess y'all have heard about the Groundswell report? This World Bank report predicts 216 million climate refugees by 2050.
Imho that's a rather conservative estimate (I reckon we could easily doublethat figure), but it gives us an idea of what's to come.
Long story short: we're in for the full dystopian experience, including the part where the dirty scary-looking radical eco-terrorists are actually the good guys trying to save everyone else from the clean-looking super-rich, their evil mega-corps, and their badass security detail. Choose your side wisely!

[A Horse Named Stranger]

Did anybody expect another outcome? COP26 - But now we are doing it for real!

The summit was always going to be like the previous editions. Head of states agree on a bunch of more or less ambitious goals, without agreeing on concrete measures on how to achieve those goals. Then at the next summit they agree on and bemoan the fact, that they failed to achieve a single goal from the previous summit. Then they pass slightly more ambitious goals, without concrete measure how to get there. Rinse and repeat.