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.
“The growth rate of methane is accelerating, which is worrisome,” said Drew Shindell, a climate scientist at Duke University and lead author of the study. “It was quite flat until around 20 years ago and just in the last few years we’ve had this huge dump of methane. It’s made the job of tackling anthropogenic warming all the more challenging.”
So far in the 2020s, global methane emissions have typically been about 30m tons higher each year than during last decade, with annual records in methane emissions broken in 2021 and again in 2022. While there is no single clear reason for this, scientists point to a number of factors.
Methane comes from the drilling and processing of oil, gas and coal, with a boom in fracking causing a rash of new gas projects this century. The gas is also emitted from livestock, primarily through the burps of cows, and increased animal agriculture, as well as to a lesser degree expanding rice production, has contributed.
Meanwhile, rising global heat is causing the faster decomposition of organic matter in wetlands, thereby releasing more methane.
If you liked this post, you’ll love our daily environmental newsletter, EnviroPolitics. It’s packed daily with the latest news, commentary, and legislative updates from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, Delaware…and beyond. Please do not take our word for it, try it free for an entire month. No obligation.
