'Until recently, tracking the location and magnitude of methane leaks was difficult. Now, infrared cameras and advanced satellites can estimate methane emissions around the globe, giving scientists and regulators insight into what's being released from facilities.''According to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the concentration of methane in the atmosphere is higher now than any time in at least 800,000 years.
With Earth rapidly approaching the 1.5-degree-Celsius threshold above preindustrial levels, scientists say methane emissions need to be reduced fast. Charles Koven, a lead author of the IPCC report, said this is due to methane's incredible warming power.
"The fastest way that we might mitigate some of the climate change that we're seeing already in the short term is by reducing methane," Koven told CNN. "If we were to reduce methane emissions, it would act to offset one of these sources of warming."
If the world stopped emitting carbon dioxide tomorrow, Koven said, global temperatures wouldn't begin to cool for many years because of how long the gas stays in the atmosphere. Reducing methane is the easiest knob to turn to change the path of global temperature in the next 10 years, he said.
Methane, the main component of the natural gas we use to fuel our stoves and heat our homes, can be produced in nature by belching volcanoes and decomposing plant matter. But it is also pumped into the atmosphere in much larger amounts by landfills, livestock and the oil and gas industry.
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Until recently, tracking the location and magnitude of methane leaks was difficult. Now, infrared cameras and advanced satellites can estimate methane emissions around the globe, giving scientists and regulators insight into what's being released from facilities.
Climatologists at NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration previously told CNN that pernicious changes in the climate system will only intensify unless people stop using fuels that burn and leak greenhouse gases like methane.
"For carbon dioxide, we've always known about power plants and smokestacks and things like that; but with methane, until recent years, we didn't understand how much an influence a small number of large sources have really had," Robert Jackson, professor of environmental science at Stanford University, told CNN. "We didn't understand how long the tail was and how important the super-emitters were for reducing emissions."
The latest IPCC assessment highlights that scientists now have a better understanding of how much methane is being released by human activity like agriculture and the fossil fuel industry, and how much it contributes to the climate crisis.
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'..the need to control a more insidious culprit: methane..', August 12, 2021
Context'Humanity needs to "grow up" and deal with the issue of climate change .. very substantial reductions by 2030.'