Greenhouse gas has undergone rapid acceleration and scientists say it may be due to atmospheric changes
Methane is four times more sensitive to global warming than previously thought, a new study shows. The result helps to explain the rapid growth in methane in recent years and suggests that, if left unchecked, methane related warming will escalate in the decades to come.
“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,” said Simon Redfern, an earth scientist at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
But another explanation could be a slowdown of the chemical reaction that removes methane from the atmosphere. The predominant way in which methane is “mopped up” is via reaction with hydroxyl radicals in the atmosphere. To understand what was driving the methane acceleration, Redfern and his colleague Chin-Hsien Cheng used four decades of methane measurements and analysed changes in the climate to identify how the availability of hydroxyl radicals might have changed and what impact the changing climate might have had on methane sources.
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