From the UNIVERSITY OF YORK and the “blame Russia” department.
Global levels of ethane and propane in the atmosphere have been underestimated by more than 50%, new research involving scientists at the University of York has revealed.
These hydrocarbons are particularly harmful in large cities where, through chemical reactions with emissions from cars, they form ozone – a greenhouse gas which is a key component of smog and directly linked to increases in mortality.
Ethane and propane escape into the air from leaks during natural gas extraction and distribution, including from fracking – the process of drilling down into the earth and fracturing rock to extract shale gas. This new study shows that global fossil fuel emissions of these hydrocarbons have been underestimated and are a factor of 2-3 times higher than previously thought.
The authors of the international study involving researchers from York, Oslo and Colorado are now calling for further investigation into fossil fuel emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas which is emitted along with ethane and propane from natural gas sources.
Co-author of the study, Professor Lucy Carpenter from the Department of Chemistry at the University of York, said: “We know that a major source of ethane and propane in the atmosphere is from “fugitive” or unintentional escaping emissions during fossil fuel extraction and distribution. If ethane and propane are being released at greater rates than we thought, then we also need to carefully re-evaluate how much of the recent growth of methane in the atmosphere may also have come from oil and natural gas development. The current policy case for fracking, for example, is partly based on the belief that it is less polluting that coal.”
The study used data collected from 20 observatories world-wide. The researchers from the University of York provided high-resolution data from a monitoring station in Cape Verde – a crucial location in the Atlantic which captures air blown over the Sahara, from North America, the Middle East and North Africa.
Like other hydrocarbons, when ethane and propane mix with nitrogen oxides from vehicles and power plants they form ozone in the troposphere – the lowest layer of the atmosphere that constitutes the air we breathe. While ozone in the Earth’s second layer of atmosphere – the stratosphere – is desirable, ground level ozone has damaging consequences for ecosystems and human health.
Scientists need to understand accurately the levels of hydrocarbons in the atmosphere to predict the exposure of populations to ozone. This is particularly important for some suburban and rural areas which are already known to be on the edge of the limits of safe exposure.
Professor Ally Lewis, a co-author of the study from the Department of Chemistry at the University of York added: “Levels of ethane and propane declined in many places the 1980s and 1990s, but global growth in demand for natural gas means these trends may be reversing. The effects of higher ozone would be felt in the rural environment where it damages crops and plants, and in cities on human health.
“Tropospheric ozone causes a variety of serious health complaints and along with particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide is one of the three major causes of pollution-related deaths.”
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Added: The paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-018-0073-0
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Oh no! We’re gonna die from propane & ethane in the air. Quick, what are the % concentrations so we can start worrying about it.
LEL for propane is 2.2% and it’s 3% for ethane… If I remember correctly.
I see — parts per trillion on the charts. So now I’m really worried. /sarc
So we just need to capture that Ozone and transport it to the Antarctic Ozone Holes to fill in the blanks
Beng135==> But if they used a 0 to 6 ppb scale it would just not look scary enough.
With nature not cooperating and failing to convince everyone the world will self destruct due to CO2 they’re falling back to the old reliable ozone depletion.
Naah. This deals with the US EPA and CARB’ s favorite reason to restrict development, ground level ozone. As the model is that volatile organic compounds, like propane, react to cause ozone, which causes all sorts of evil effects, the regulated entity cannot do whatever it was they were doing the regulators disapprove of.
Right. Ozone near the ground is evil, ozone in the upper atmosphere is necessary.
Why don’t we just eliminate all human life on earth?…which is what I expect the Greenies to say any day now. Just think…7.5 billion fewer flatulent people could make a real reduction in methane in the atmosphere, and leave the planet for the plants and other animals!
I assume the ppt is parts per trillion? While I have no doubt flaring is dumping volatile everything into the air with some unburnt gases and some leakage around the wellhead, as well who know what the Ruskies are doing, 1000 ppt is 1 ppb (billion), which isn’t that much. One good volcano belch in Indonesia probably puts that into the air.
And if it is parts per trillion, why don’t they use ppb and use 1,2,3 on the vertical axis? I guess 3000 looks worse the 3.
Answered your own question, you did.
The colour scale says it all. Blue is the calming “its all right your safe now” colour and red/purple “ITS ARMAGEDDON” colour.
I notice in OZ the TV news in particular use a similar scale so in summer the bulk of the continent is SCREAMING purple when its 40˚ and is RED at just 30˚ or so. Purple at 50˚ seems not unreasonable as 50˚ is bloody hot and 40˚ is very hot but not that uncommon. 30˚ is just a summer’s day and a benign orange would seem appropriate.
This is just the marketing industry infiltrating everything. Science ‘communications’ is a bit part of the CAGW scam.
Your own question answered, you did.
😉
Yoda’s not as fast on the uptake as he used to be.
A planet that does not develop intelligent life is a waste of a perfectly good planet. To have a planet with nothing but animals constantly eating each other is by no means idyllic or pleasant and far from peaceful.
Yes, but before patriarchal white men colonized the Western hemisphere, all the people that lived here previously knew nothing of hardship, politics, competition over land and scarce resources, tribalism, war, slavery, taking scalps of dead enemies as trophies, raping and stealing conquered women, natural disasters, floods, fires, tornadoes, hurricanes, and the occasional religious impulse to (literally) cut the beating heart out of the chest of a vanquished foe. Oh, wait….
Meanwhile the most accurate evah! orbiting mapper of evil carbon dioxide (OCO-2) goes largely uncommented by academia beyond a desultory and shameless series of “data fusion” efforts with modeled data.
It’s a game and not one we should tolerate.
So it might go up again until it was as bad as the 1990s… when it wasn’t a problem. These people are just transparent anti-frackers. It embarrasses me to see chemists behaving like this.
Ah yes, ozone. Nature’s Windex ™. Cleans things up nice and neat. As long as we have an oxygen atmosphere, sunlight, and hydrocarbons of whatever sort, there will be ozone.
Ozone also replaces that nasty chlorine, water purification and other uses and used in Industrial Ozone scrubbers, which clean up other nasty things..
What to do? What to do?
Gotta die of something…
Global temperature measurements show that the models are running hot. If we put these new higher emission estimates into the models then they will run even hotter making them more wrong.
Considering that the new numbers are pars per trillion, they probably would register in the climate models either.
All the extra intense thunderstorms that they tell us to expect should suck the ozone up to higher altitudes where it can do its day job.
There is no need to “estimate” how much of these gases are being released.
They can be, and are being directly measured.
Further – they are all irrelevant – just sayin’
In fact, just a minute ago, I emitted some, I wonder how the green-beanies are going to account for that (oops I just emitted some more)
Color me glad, that I don’t share an office with you.
Weird Al’s cover of Britney Spears?
When they put these artificial emissions into context with natural emissions and the whole hydrocarbon cycle in the atmosphere, I might begin to look realistically at the situation. But to blame all hydrocarbon emissions on man’s activities is incorrect and should have been addressed in the peer review process.
I remember in SoCal, at least 50% of hydrocarbons in the atmosphere there were due to plant life and nothing can or should be done about that.
You’re confusing accumulated emissions from man’s activities (fossil fuel burning) with the amount of CO2 resident in the atmosphere.
Certainly in excess, but tropospheric ozone is essential for good air quality as it eliminates numerous pollutants from the air. I love the fresh air smell of ozone after a thunderstorm.
….smells like…victory!
As long as it doesn’t smell like ricksanchez769.
Thanking you for your time and effort in helping me understand some of the science related to Earth’s climate, and enlightenment to Left-wing, Liberals practices of fact manipulation, disinformation and other tomfoolery.
Ethane is number 2 on the list of volatile organic compounds that have negligible contribution to ozone formation.
http://www.cdpr.ca.gov/docs/emon/vocs/vocproj/2voc_exempt_list.pdf
I guess we can forget them blaming central Africa……….
Methane on a molecule-by-molecule basis is a less potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and there is currently 235 times as much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as there is methane. If methane increases by a factor of 250, then it becomes comparable to carbon dioxide
Everything I have read says the opposite. Do you have a source for this claim?
Beyond that, CO2 is pretty close to saturated, so extra molecules of it, don’t have much of an impact.
CH4 on the other hand is a lot further from saturation levels.
“Levels of ethane and propane declined in many places the 1980s and 1990s, but global growth in demand for natural gas means these trends may be reversing….”
Are not…we really don’t know. What we do know is how to make mountains out of molehills and spin even good news into impending doom, or at the very least, a very serious problem. You see, the government, which daily proves Menckin right*, pays our salary, and the government is only interested in very serious problems or worse. We would really like to do science and report on it without all of this spin, put we won’t get paid for that. If the boss-man needs hobgoblins, we will give him hobgoblins. It is just part of our job.
*The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. – H. L. Mencken
Methane has a half life of seven years. Really not so long in geological scales.
When comparing observations with models you can’t say the differences prove the models are correct.
Unless you’re NASA …. and the data comes from OCO-2
Maybe that Russian gas came out of one of these:
http://siberiantimes.com/PICTURES/SCIENCE/Yamal-craters-July-2015/inside%20b1%202014%201.jpg
This a thinly veiled hack at an attack on fracking. Fracking is the key technology responsible for the boom in oil and natural gas production in the USA that has driven down energy costs worldwide.
It ‘blows the minds’ of the Anthropogenic Global Warming cadres, who will stop at nothing to bring an end to the US energy successes that benefit a vibrant and growing world economy. These heartless socialists cannot allow the USA to yet again bring low cost, reliable energy to “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”. Keeping people destitute is paramount to their vision of a ‘low carbon consumption’ future. From their sick perspective, the low cost energy enabling technology of fracking must be stopped. Asserting it is ‘causing pollution’ will allow regulating it into oblivion!
Not even thinly veiled when the project is funded by Norway , a competitor to the US in the global oil and gas markets .
however think of it this way : fracking may produce a very small increase in near ground pollution , but it produces, as the US has demonstrated to a grateful (?) world, a whopping ( we are allowed to use that adjective thanks to Figueres) reduction in CO2 emissions, which the great Obama himself has identified as the No 1 danger to world-well being.
The implication is that the atmospheric response to anthropogenic CO2 in the wild is even less significant than previously assumed and more muted than observed.
A day in the life of a lib.
Wow! I never knew liberals all spoke Portuguese.
Sit down and shut-up you serfs, only we the elite of the UN are allowed to fly anywhere and run our limousines.
You’re dismissed, on the way out turn the A/C up.
So now there could be a lot more methane (GHG) than we thought, but we didn’t notice, because the amount of warming didn’t give us cause to go looking for it. Another way of saying this is that the climate sensitivity to methane may be less than we thought. That is no surprise, because climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide seems to be considerably less than we thought, too.
Yet, water vapour as a GHG seems to explain the retention of heat known as the GreenHouse effect. Leaving aside other possibilities such as gravity/gas laws then why does there seem to be a discrepancy between the effectiveness of water vapour and that of other GH gases?
That is a puzzle that has been bugging me for a long time, but as I said, I’m not a climate scientist and I am not certain that such a discrepancy even exists. However, my experience in other fields has taught me that discrepancies like this one, if true, should not be ignored. They can often yield important understanding and flawed assumptions.
The so-called popular press endlessly tells us that methane is maybe 20 to over 80 times more powerful as CO2 in trapping heat. They never tell us how much methane will actually run-up global temperatures by 2100. The reason for that is simple. The run-up in global temperature over the next 82 years due to methane might be as much as a few hundredths of a degree. In other words not measurable.
But it doesn’t matter the misleading statistic will continue to be blabbed until the whole house of cards finally comes down.