This blog post by John Lynch of the Oxford Livestock, Environment and People programme explains how GWP* can be used to describe the warming effect of both short- and long-lived greenhouse gases, particularly when applied to livestock.
Using GWP* (as opposed to GWP100), stable levels of methane emissions are reported as causing warming equivalent to a fairly small pulse of carbon dioxide. Increasing methane emissions slightly would cause warming equivalent to a large pulse of carbon dioxide emissions, while decreasing methane emissions slightly would cause a decrease in warming, equivalent to removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Read the full piece here. See also the paper Demonstrating GWP*: a means of reporting warming-equivalent emissions that captures the contrasting impacts of short- and long-lived climate pollutants on which the blog is based, and the Foodsource building block Agricultural methane and its role as a greenhouse gas.
Post a new comment »