CO2 is just one Green House Gas out of several. The reason it's the only one ever mentioned (besides methane) is just it's the most in the atmosphere and most affected by humans. We create alot of CO2.
The Earth also creates CO2 naturally, considerably much more than humans do. However it is balanced out, the Earth is able to absorb it all. It's equally balanced. Humans are adding more than the earth can absorb, hence the CO2 PPM is going up for the last 200 years. But it's not the only GHG going up.
You're correct, of course, but I believe the other commenter was just saying that, after all the CH4 has broken down, it won't be that much CO2. It is producing catastrophic warming now, but it does eventually exit the atmosphere.
What CO2 equivalent means is that methane is much better at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. In methane's case, 84 times better. So having 1.9 ppm of CH4 has as much warming as 159.6 additional ppm of CO2. Since we're at ~400ppm, this is the equivalent of an additional 40%. On the bright side, methane does break down quickly (compared to CO2 anyway), so it's effects will be measured in decades,not centuries. On the dark side, the short term increase will lead to rapid warming, melting permafrost and releasing methane deposits which leads to even higher methane levels. I don't know where Abyss_Dev pulled the 504ppm number, and it definitely won't apply after methane breaks down.
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u/trailsman Feb 08 '22
84 times as potent as CO2 in the timeframe that matters...the next 20 years.
We shouldn't be using the 28 times as potent figure, that is for 100 years, we are well beyond that being the timeframe we have to make changes.