Gina M Randazzo/ZUMA
This story was originally published by Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Have you heard about the miracle quick fix for our climate ills?
The greenhouse gas methane is responsible for roughly 30 percent of the increase in global temperature since the Industrial Revolution and is often described as 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Sometimes news outlets remember to qualify that with “over 20 years,” and sometimes
This summer was the hottest ever recorded on Earth, and 2023 is on track to be the hottest year. Heat waves threatened people’s health across North America, Europe and Asia. Canada had its worst wildfire season ever, and flames devastated the city of Lahaina in Maui. Los Angeles was pounded by an unheard-of summer tropical storm while rains in Libya caused devastating floods that left thousands dead and missing. This extreme weather is a warning sign that we are living
Earth has a cow problem. Cow agriculture is one of the largest emitters of climate-warming methane to the atmosphere.
But adding a type of red algae known for its methane-inhibiting properties to cow feces might help. Doing so reduces the production of methane within feces by about 44 percent, researchers report July 13 in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems. That offers a promising new avenue to reduce overall methane emissions from cattle, the scientists say.
Melissa and Jim Nestor at their farm in Taylor County, Virginia. James Bruggers
This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Month-old kittens scamper around, tumbling into one another on the grass. A black-and-white border collie, Maggie, nestles against the side of a farmhouse and nurses a puppy. Beef cattle graze on the hillside behind the house, which has been vacant since last summer—when, without warning, the
Methane is a greenhouse gas with dual personalities. It heats Earth’s atmosphere 28 times as potently as carbon dioxide, gram for gram. But its absorption of the sun’s radiation high in the atmosphere also alters cloud patterns — casting a bit of shadow on its warming effect.
So rather than adding even more thermal energy to the atmosphere, as previously thought, methane’s solar absorption sets off a cascade of events that reduces its overall warming effect by about 30 percent,
Methane is flared at at a North Dakota oil well pad in May 2021.Matthew Brown/AP
This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
More than 1,000 “super-emitter” sites gushed the potent greenhouse gas methane into the global atmosphere in 2022, the Guardian can reveal, mostly from oil and gas facilities. The worst single leak spewed the pollution at a rate equivalent to 67 million running cars.
Separate data
Methane gas that leaked from a damaged Nord Stream pipeline in September will not increase global warming, a new study claims.
The leaks will have a ‘negligible’ effect on warming, despite releasing 220,000 tons of methane into the air, academics say.
This is relatively ‘tiny’ and too small to affect humans compared with emissions from sources such as the coal and gas industries, they add.
The cause of the pipeline damage is unknown, although there are suspicions from Western leaders
Huge leaks in the two largest gas pipelines linking Russia to Europe are spewing out vast quantities of natural gas – at an estimated rate of 500 metric tons per hour when first breached.
As well as the potentially devastating implications for global energy supply, the leaks could also have an ‘unprecedented’ environmental impact, experts have warned.
Gas has been spewing from both Nord Stream 1 and 2 since Monday, after three leaks mysteriously appeared in the system.
One has
