Researchers are racing to find out why methane levels are increasing so fast
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Re: Researchers are racing to find out why methane levels are increasing so fast
#2(Disclaimer I believe in climate change with all my heart)
If methane levels are higher than we thought wouldn’t that make our climate models wrong? Ie less of a heating effect from co2?
Re: Researchers are racing to find out why methane levels are increasing so fast
#3I thought it was perfectly well understood. Hundreds to thousands of megatons of methane is trapped in permafrost. When the warmest point of the year melts the now ill-named permafrost, methane gets released.
Re: Researchers are racing to find out why methane levels are increasing so fast
#4(Disclaimer I believe in climate change with all my heart) If methane levels are higher than we thought wouldn’t that make our climate models wrong? Ie less of a heating effect from co2?
Methane is increasing now precipitously compared to the last couple of decades. We hit an inflection point apparently in the last couple of years.
Re: Researchers are racing to find out why methane levels are increasing so fast
#5(Disclaimer I believe in climate change with all my heart) If methane levels are higher than we thought wouldn’t that make our climate models wrong? Ie less of a heating effect from co2?
It would mean that a lower fraction of the heating effect we're observing is from CO2. However, if we've correctly estimated the impact of CO2, then that just means that there will be more absolute heating than we had otherwise predicted.
Re: Researchers are racing to find out why methane levels are increasing so fast
#6Relevant Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis
Re: Researchers are racing to find out why methane levels are increasing so fast
#7(Disclaimer I believe in climate change with all my heart) If methane levels are higher than we thought wouldn’t that make our climate models wrong? Ie less of a heating effect from co2?
That would be true if methane had been higher than we thought all along. That's not the case, since it's not hard to measure the methane level.
What's happening is that the methane level is increasing faster than people expected. It could be from permafrost melting, or leaks from natural gas infrastructure, or various other things.
Re: Researchers are racing to find out why methane levels are increasing so fast
#8I thought it was perfectly well understood. Hundreds to thousands of megatons of methane is trapped in permafrost. When the warmest point of the year melts the now ill-named permafrost, methane gets released.
There's more than one cause. A large chunk of the increased methane emissions come from China industralising in a particularly dirty, coal-burning way and releasing loads of methane in the process: https://phys.org/news/2019-01-china-methane-emissions.html
Re: Researchers are racing to find out why methane levels are increasing so fast
#9I thought it was perfectly well understood. Hundreds to thousands of megatons of methane is trapped in permafrost. When the warmest point of the year melts the now ill-named permafrost, methane gets released.
That's one source. The article mentions others. People are trying to figure out which sources are most significant at the moment.
Re: Researchers are racing to find out why methane levels are increasing so fast
#10There's already a news on front page at the moment which says bird population is declining in North America. The comments section mention that it's not just North America but also Britain, France and also that it could be due to declining insect population.
We rarely get this kind of data from developing countries, which means these studies are rarely or not at all performed simply because they don't have resources to focus on these causes. We have no idea how much worse the situation is.
Here we have methane levels increasing fast. There was another news that the third pole of earth i.e. Himalaya is melting rapidly. I am sure there are plenty more that I have missed.
Do we need more evidence to act? What are we waiting for?