
Los Angeles gas leak is a global disaster - anigbrowl
http://gizmodo.com/las-gas-leak-disaster-is-a-bigger-problem-than-you-real-1750035270
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anotheryou
hm. article didn't really put it in to any perspective..

how bad is this? deep-water horizon bad? fukushima-bad? wildfire-bad?

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noondip
1,300 metric tons of CH4 leaked per day seems massive. Total anthropogenic
U.S. emissions are 30 teragrams - 30 million metric tons
([http://www.pnas.org/content/110/50/20018.full.pdf](http://www.pnas.org/content/110/50/20018.full.pdf)).
An extra half a million tons of this stuff per year is probably not good,
although I'm not an expert and the data seems subject to some controversy.

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gizmo686
It is worth pointing out that your link says 30 million metric tons of CH4.
The biggest concern I am aware of (from the global perspective) is the global
warming effect, for which it would be more meaningful to talk about all
greenhouse gas emmisions.

The EPA estimates that we released the equivelent of 6,742 million metric tons
of CO2 in 2013 (scaled to look at the warming effect over a 100 year period)
[0]. The standard conversrion of CH4 to CO2 emissions is 25x, so we are
leaking 32,500 metric tons CO2 equivelent an hour.

If we assume this leak will last for 1 year, it will leak a total of ~285
million metric tons of CO2 equivalent, or about 4% of our annual emissions.

[0][http://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/pdfs/usinventoryreport/US-...](http://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/pdfs/usinventoryreport/US-
GHG-Inventory-2015-Chapter-2-Trends.pdf)

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noondip
I've read the 25x conversion number is low and out of date. Is the following
source more credible than EPA?

> In the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
> Change, methane has a lifetime of 12.4 years and with climate-carbon
> feedbacks a global warming potential of 86 over 20 years and 34 over 100
> years in response to emissions.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global-
warming_potential#cite_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global-
warming_potential#cite_note-1)

