Part of the Hacker News guidelines is to assume good faith.

As the IPCC says:

>..There is no scientific argument for selecting 100 years compared with other choices (Fuglestvedt et al., 2003; Shine, 2009). The choice of time horizon is a value judgement since it depends on the relative weight assigned to effects at different times.

I chose 100 years since you seemed to imply that since methane was "front loaded" then "...there are significant benefits from eventually moving to something else, but little long term advantage due to methane from doing so sooner."

Trying to ignore the problems of methane in the atmosphere is not helpful. As the Think Progress article says

>...The IPCC reports that, over a 20-year time frame, methane has a global warming potential of 86 compared to CO2, up from its previous estimate of 72. Given that we are approaching real, irreversible tipping points in the climate system, climate studies should, at the very least, include analyses that use this 20-year time horizon.

>...If we are to avoid catastrophic warming, our natural gas consumption has to peak sometime in the next 10 to 15 years, according to studies by both the Center for American Progress and the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Ahh, ok I genuinely assumed you understood what that number meant and chose to use it incorrectly.

As to 86 for 20 years still being important. These methane leaks from natural gas are nowhere near 1/86th of global CO2 production. They are not even 1/86th of the displaced CO2 from reduced coal use age.

Compare ~10 megatonnes of methane leaks worldwide from all sources of natural gas with global Fossil CO2 emissions at ~37,000 megatons per year and 740,000 over 20. Except your natural gas emissions don’t stack linearly for 20 years with past emissions. So natural gas power plants are easily a net reduction in global warming over your 20 year timetable.

It isn't clear we fully understand the extent of methane leaks in the US and probably have less info on many other countries.

This is illustrated in the Aliso Canyon leak:

>..The authors believe there are important lessons to be learned from the leak - particularly the need to monitor oil and gas facilities more carefully. They say that there has been little co-ordinated oversight of the biggest oil and gas leaks in recent years. They point to Aliso Canyon, the BP spill and the Total Elgin rig blowout in the North Sea as examples where luck more than intent ensured the impacts on the environment were monitored. In the case of Aliso Canyon, the surveying aircraft was working on another project searching for pipeline problems, when the scientists were asked to overfly the leaking well. "The state's response to Aliso Canyon was teed off by the first measurement we took, at that point no-one had any clue that this was 50,000kg per hour of gas," said Dr Conley.

This report discusses the overall level of uncertainty in this area:

>...However, given limited current evidence, it is likely that leakage at individual natural gas well sites is high enough, when combined with leakage from downstream operations, to make the total leakage exceed the 3.2% threshold beyond which gas becomes worse for the climate than coal for at least some period of time.

https://www.pnas.org/content/109/17/6435

Using coal for fuel is almost a crime against humanity considering the health costs, so switching to natural gas is harm reduction. The amount of reduction in GHG production though is more uncertain due to lack of investments in monitoring and reducing methane leakages.