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Comment by cogman10 | Hacker News Reader

I don't really see the distinction here (other than in an uber pedantic sense).

All efforts to combat global warming about reducing or eliminating the acceleration. If one of those methods is both cheap and has a fairly high impact (which, methane reduction appears to be) then why are we focusing on "but this doesn't eliminate global warming"?

Adding renewables and nuclear to the grid won't eliminate global warming, but they slow it down. Eliminating methane appears to be a route where we can more aggressively stomp on the breaks.

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I think it's important to avoid saying doing X will reduce warming if it doesn't do that, so that people don't start believing that it will be sufficient to do only this.

I've never seen anyone insinuate that eliminating methane emissions would fix global warming.

The only time I've seen that argument raised is for the opposite "Because this won't fix global warming, we shouldn't do it?".

Global warming will require a multifaceted approach to be solve. No one solution will fix it, so literally any solution is going to have a detractor that says "This won't fix it, so why bother with it?"

The title of the submission insinuates it. The comment just corrected that. Of course we should do everything we can to reduce methane emissions.

> Reducing methane is the fastest strategy available to reduce warming

Reducing and fixing or eliminating are not the same thing. How could they have worded the title better? "Limiting methane emissions will have an outsized impact given the cost"?

Reducing global average warming is not the same as reducing global average temperature, although that can be the result over time if the rate of warming is reduced below 0. 'X will reduce warming' is describing a reduction to the positive rate of change.

It's also true that increasing global average warming can result in reduced warming and temperatures in some geographic areas so it is important to be specific with terminology depending on which aspect of the climate change debate we're talking about. You are right that the title is unintentionally misleading in this regard.

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