login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Dr Ramzy Baroud
Rachel Marsden
Belen Fernandez
Tarik Cyril Amar
Muhannad Ayyash
Somdeep Sen
Yara Hawari
Stephanie A. Sarkis Ph.d
Maximilian Hess
Santiago Zabala
Nick Buxton
Kamel Hawwash
Why we’re barely keeping track of this growing climate problem
Odorless and colorless, methane is a gas that is easy to miss — but it’s one of the most important contributors to global warming. It can trap up to 84 times as much heat as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, though it breaks down much faster. Measured over 100 years, its warming effect is about 30 times that of an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide.
That means that over the course of decades, it takes smaller amounts of methane than carbon dioxide to heat up the planet to the same level. Nearly a third of the increase in global average temperatures since the Industrial Revolution is due to methane, and about two-thirds of those methane emissions comes from human activity like energy production and cattle farming. It’s one of the biggest and fastest ways that human beings are warming the Earth.
But the flip side of that math is that cutting methane emissions is one of the most effective ways to limit climate change.
In 2021, more than 100 countries including the United States committed to reducing their methane pollution by at least 30 percent below 2020 levels by 2030. But some of the largest methane emitters like Russia and China still haven’t signed on, and according to a new report from the International Energy Agency, global methane emissions from energy production are still rising.
Yet the tracking of exactly how much methane is reaching the atmosphere isn’t as precise as it is for carbon dioxide. “Little or no measurement-based data is used to report methane emissions in most parts of the world,” according to the IEA. “This is a major issue because measured emissions tend to be higher than reported emissions.” It’s also hard to trace methane to specific sources — whether from natural sources like swamps, or from human activities like fossil fuel extraction, farming, or deforestation.
Researchers are gaining a better understanding of where methane is coming from, surveilling potential sources from the ground, from the sky, and from space. It turns out a lot of methane is coming from underappreciated sources, including coal mines and........
© Vox
visit website