A new study shows that methane is four times more sensitive to global warming than previously thought, reported The Guardian.
The study justified the rapid growth in methane in recent years and revealed that methane-related global heating could potentially escalate in the future decades unchecked.
Measurements from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recorded the growth of this greenhouse gas passing 1,900 parts a billion last year, nearly triple pre-industrial levels and 80 times as potent as carbon dioxide over a 20-year time span.
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An earth scientist at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, Simon Redfern, claimed, “What has been particularly puzzling has been the fact that methane emissions have been increasing at even greater rates in the last two years, despite the global pandemic, when anthropogenic sources were assumed to be less significant.”
Natural sources such as wetlands contribute to nearly 40% of methane emissions, and on the other hand, anthropogenic sources such as cattle farming, fossil fuel extraction, and landfill sites contribute to 60% of the emissions.
Expanding exploration of oil and natural gas, rising emissions from agriculture and landfill, and rising natural emissions as tropical wetlands warm and Arctic tundra melts are a few among others to be blamed for the rising methane emissions.
Generally, methane is removed from the atmosphere through a reaction with hydroxyl radicals (OH) also present in the atmosphere. However, a slowdown in this chemical reaction can also be an explanation for the rise in methane emissions.
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The Guardian quoted Redfern, who said, “The hydroxyl radical has been termed the ‘detergent’ of the atmosphere because it works to cleanse the atmosphere of harmful trace gases. On average, a carbon monoxide molecule remains in the atmosphere for about three months before it’s attacked by a hydroxyl radical, while methane persists for about a decade. So wildfires have a swift impact on using up the hydroxyl ‘detergent’ and reduce the methane removal.”
Redfern and his colleague Chin-Hsien Cheng used four decades of methane measurements to understand the driving force of methane acceleration. They analysed changes in the climate to identify how the availability of hydroxyl radicals influenced the impact of changing climate on methane sources.
The findings of the study have been published in the journal Nature Communications.
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The study concluded that global warming is four times more influential in speeding up methane emissions than previously estimated, with increasing temperatures contributing to producing more methane and simultaneously slowing down the removal of methane from the atmosphere.
“It was a really shocking result and highlights that the effects of climate change can be even more extreme and dangerous than we thought. The worry is that climate change may accelerate such risks, feeding back to accelerating atmospheric methane concentrations in a vicious circle,” The Guardian quoted Redfern.
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