Researchers call for immediate action to reduce methane emissions and avert dangerous escalation in climate crisis

Researchers call for immediate action to reduce methane emissions and avert dangerous escalation in climate crisis

Global emissions of methane, a powerful planet-heating gas, are “rising rapidly” at the fastest rate in decades, requiring immediate action to help avert a dangerous escalation in the climate crisis, a new study has warned.

Methane emissions are responsible for half of the global heating already experienced, have been climbing significantly since around 2006 and will continue to grow throughout the rest of the 2020s unless new steps are taken to curb this pollution, concludes the new paper. The research is authored by more than a dozen scientists from around the world and published on Tuesday.

While the world “quite rightly” has focused on carbon dioxide as the primary driver of rising global temperatures, states the paper published in Frontiers in Science, little has been done to address methane, despite it having 80 times the warming power of CO2 in the first 20 years after it reaches the atmosphere.

  • TheDemonBuer@lemmy.world
    24·
    4 months ago

    We’re shutting down a lot of coal power plants, which is very good, but most of them are being replaced with natural gas plants. Natural gas has about half the carbon emissions of coal, but natural gas is mostly just methane. There are many points along the entire natural gas infrastructure where methane can leak and enter the atmosphere.

    • SeaJ@lemm.ee
      5·
      4 months ago

      Yeah. Our natural gas (methane) use has increased dramatically. From a warming effect standpoint, our methane lines are leaky enough to make switching from coal to methane a complete wash. It is cleaner in that there is not a ton of extra garbage being burned but the warming effect is just as bad.