A new paper just published in the PNAS identifies different culprits.
Abstract
The growth rate of the atmospheric abundance of methane (CH4) reached a record high of 15.4 ppb yr−1 between 2020 and 2022, but the mechanisms driving the accelerated CH4 growth have so far been unclear. In this work, we use measurements of the 13C:12C ratio of CH4 (expressed as δ13CCH4) from NOAA’s Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network and a box model to investigate potential drivers for the rapid CH4 growth. These measurements show that the record-high CH4 growth in 2020–2022 was accompanied by a sharp decline in δ13CCH4, indicating that the increase in CH4 abundance was mainly driven by increased emissions from microbial sources such as wetlands, waste, and agriculture. We use our box model to reject increasing fossil fuel emissions or decreasing hydroxyl radical sink as the dominant driver for increasing global methane abundance.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2411212121
Methane (CH4) is the second-most abundant anthropogenic greenhouse gas and has global warming potential (GWP) of 28 over 100 y (1); as a result, CH4 has consequential near-term radiative effects and is a prominent target for mitigation (2). Following a short pause in growth from 1999 to 2006, both the abundance and growth rate of atmospheric methane have been increasing (3). During 2020–2022, the observed CH4 growth rate reached a record high since NOAA measurements began in 1983, averaging 15.4 ± 0.6 ppb yr−1 (4). Understanding the mechanisms driving this accelerated growth is essential for predicting its future climate impact and providing scientific support for climate mitigation strategies (2).
The carbon isotopic composition of atmospheric CH4 (δ13CCH4) is a powerful tool for tracking the sources and sinks of atmospheric CH4. Different CH4 sources have distinctive δ13CCH4 values: Microbial CH4 emissions (wetlands, livestock, landfills, etc.) have lower δ13CCH4 values (global mean of –62‰) than pyrogenic (biomass and biofuel burning, global mean of –24‰) and fossil fuel CH4 emissions (global mean of –45‰) (5). Various sinks of atmospheric CH4 also have distinctive isotopic effects. Therefore, combined observations of atmospheric CH4 mole fraction and δ13CCH4 can provide unique constraints on the changes of global CH4 sources and sinks during the post-2006 rapid CH4 growth.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Global Monitoring Laboratory (NOAA/GML) has been carefully monitoring the global CH4 burden through the Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network (GGGRN) for over four decades. The collaboration between NOAA/GML and the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) at the University of Colorado Boulder has enabled δ13CCH4 measurements from the GGGRN since 1998, currently measuring weekly or biweekly from 22 globally distributed background sites (6). The dataset has been widely used for studying the evolution of global CH4 sources and sinks (7–9). Here, we report our most recent observations of atmospheric CH4 mole fractions and δ13CCH4 values through the end of 2022 and then use a box model to examine and quantify the contributions of potential drivers of the record-high CH4 growth rate.
The rest of the paper can be found here.
This is unlikely to mollify climate zealots as agriculture is listed among the potential causes. With biological activity exploding across the world, due to CO2 fertilization, I personally wonder how much of this is increasing wetland productivity as well as flourishing soil microbes.
H/T Steve Milloy.
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But then Happer and Wijngaarden have shown rather conclusively that in fact, methane has a very small influence on global warming, immeasurably small at current levels.
They did not SHOW that to be true. They wrote junk science that couldn’t pass muster in a sixth grade science class
So how much global warming is methane going to produce by the end of the century?
So does this pass the “junk science” test. It is from a climate porn site. 😉
You have not shown your claim to be true.
So, 5 grades higher than anything you could ever write !
Please explain in your own words why you think Dependence of Earth’s Thermal Radiation on Five Most Abundant Greenhouse Gases is junk science
If you wish to declare the paper incorrect, then you need to do more than make an unsupported assertion of your opinion.
Try showing what mistakes they made and why they are mistakes. If you can’t do that then your assertion is not worth the energy used while typing your assertion.
Get lost, stinking troll.
I approve this message. Lol.
methane has a very small influence on global warming
“Methane (CH4) is the second-most abundant anthropogenic greenhouse gas and has global warming potential (GWP) of 28 over 100 y (1); as a result, CH4 has consequential near-term radiative effects . . .”
___________________________________________________________________________
How much and exactly what are those radiative effects?
It is truly amazing that we are told about the the global warming potential of methane and how much more heat it will trap compared to CO2 but we are NEVER told what the resulting effect is except in this case it’s consequential.
So small that it could never be measured.
And the Climate Crusaders what to regulate cattle ranches,
dairy farms and rice paddies because of it.
FYI, there is no laboratory apparatus for measuring the heating effect of a greenhouse gas on air when the gas mixture is illuminated with IR light.
Where did you read that? Mad Magazine?
I tried searching the net for such an apparatus, but found no articles describing one.
Harold, search for “Nondispersive infrared sensor”. I used to work for a company that relied on this physical effect to measure the concentration of various gases in air.
Basically an NDIR sensor comprises a temperature controlled infrared source, a column into which the air sample is pumped, an optical filter for frequency selection and a passive infrared sensor to detect the amount of transmission of infrared energy through the sample (It’s a bit more involved than that but I doubt my former employer would appreciate me revealing all the detail)
When designing a sensor for a specific gas, HITRAN was the master resource. I can assure you that the HITRAN data is an accurate account of infrared absorption. Our business relied on it.
Experience with this employer taught me a few other things:
1: The CO2 logarithmic ‘saturation’ is real; It is very difficult to detect the difference between ‘background’ CO2 (it was about 360 ppmv back then) and say 500 ppmv, because there is very little additional absorption.
2: All IR active gases have an approximately logarithmic curve for absorption vs concentration. Probably the reason for the panic over CH4 and N2O is that the atmospheric concentrations are low, which puts them on the steep part of the curve but this overlooks the fact that there are so few molecules to do the absorbing:
https://cw50b.wordpress.com/cagw/the-methane-myth/
Nice comment!
However, the device you mention does not measure the “heating effect” of the molecules, only the absorption (emissivity?) as HP pointed out.
You can go on to do the sums, because energy is conserved. It’s essentially what Wijngaarden and Happer have done: they work out how much IR energy gets re-emitted, and how much is thermalised in molecular collisions, and how much simply passes through. The answers are typically quite small, even with a relatively hot (i.e. high flux) IR lamp in the device.
I am a really old organic chemist and know about IR spectroscopy.
Suppose a gas cell containing ca 400 ppmv CO2 is placed in the spectrometer and irradiate with IR light. How much would temperature of the gas increase?
Please go to: http://www.John-Daly.com. This is the late
John Daly’s website: “Still Waiting for Greenhouse”.
From the homepage, scroll down to the end and click on
“Station Temperature Data”. On the World Map, click on NA and then on Pacific. Finally, scroll down and click on
“Death Valley”.
The graphic shows plots of the average annual seasonal temperatures and a plot the average annual temperature. The plots are fairly flat. Thus it can be concluded from the empirical temperature data that CO2 did not cause any significant heating of the dry desert air.
You should check out the temperature graphs from many of the cities and other sites such islands.
You should also check out the essays.
Harold, thanks for the link to the temperature data, I had not seen that before. Your comment applies at a fair few other locations too. The most interesting was West Point / Central Park. West Point fairly flat, Central Park increasing; UHI?
Point taken – I have not offered proof that the temperature of the sensor would increase as the concentration of absorbing gas increases, because the sensor is a closed system. I am guilty of projecting the observed absorption onto an open system where an increasing concentration of an absorbing gas results in less heat leaving the system.
Back to the drawing board 🙁
If everybody learned about the late John Daly’s website, all this global warming, climate change, and greenhouse emission nonsense would vanish in an instant. And all the greenie wackos would start babbling about their lost cause and then go wandering in the streets searching for something new to protest.
You should go to “Science of Climate Change 4 (1) and read the review by Roy Clark. The review is 78 pages, is highly technical and has very extensive bibliography. He shows that many ideas and proposals about global waring are based on erroneous assumptions and faulty mathematical analyses. He reviews papers reporting on the role the wind in transporting water into atmosphere. Climate models do consider the effects of the winds.
I have always marveled about the work of John Daly.
How did access and process all that temperature data?
Unfortunately, he died a young man.
You again fail to explain your smarmy post thus of zero value.
Ok beetroot…. present your evidence.
Otherwise you are just doing your usual red turnip-minded blathering.
Prove him wrong.
Show us the experiment where “measuring the heating effect of a greenhouse gas on air when the gas mixture is illuminated with IR light” has been demonstrated.
Mr. Breton I have attached a table of specific heat for various atmospheric gases. Please note the one for air. There is only one column for temperature versus kJ/kg K. If IR caused an increase in the air temperature why is there not another column to see with and without infrared?
The same applies to the CO2 table also.
Specific heats are calculated AFTER whatever caused the heat input to be thermalized throughout the test sample. So the IR absorption at different frequencies is irrelevant.
Thanks you made my point.
Haha, amazing self justification. I’ll try again…Whatever energy that heats the gas is used to determine it’s “specific heat”. IR, UV, etc., or conduction could supply the energy per unit mass that goes into the specific heat measurement. So there is no need of different columns in the specific heat table “with and without infrared” as you queried. That doesn’t mean IR can’t heat CO2.
The warming effect of CO2 has been measured in a lab since 1906. The current infrared spectroscopy data for all greenhouse gases are in the HITRAN am MODTRAN databases. Your claim is nonsense
IR data in these data bases can not be used to calculate the how warming of air containing CO2 or H20 would occur when is it illuminated with IR light.
I am vaguely aware of some these earlier experiments, but the data is not good enough to convince most people that CO2 is a molecule we do not have to worry about.
When I mentioned “apparatus”, I meant a modern “apparatus”.
Could you post some ref’s for these studies?
We have to put an end to all this CO2 nonsense. There is just too little CO2 in to cause any warming of air. Look what all this nonsense has done to the UK.
BTW: Didn’t I mention that you should go the website of the late John Daly?
You should go to “Science of Climate Change 4 (1)” and read the review by Roy Clark.
There is a strong consensus including almost all skeptic scientists that HITRAN and MODTRAN are useful proxies for the warming effect of CO2 and methane.
The wild controversy over the long term effect of manmade CO2 emissions comes with debates over KNOWN feedbacks to the warming by manmade CO2 emissions.
CO2 alone would cause only +0.7 degrees C. warming for CO2 x 2 … Methane about +0.07 degrees per CH4 x 2, which could be too small to measure.
Greenhouse warming is mainly in colder climates, mainly in the six coldest months f the year and mainly at night, meaning beneficial warmer winters. The past 50 years of global warming has been good news.
KNOWN FEEDBACKS to a warming Earth
(1) POSITIVE FEEDBACK
Water vapor positive feedback guessed from zero effect to 8x amplification of CO2 warming (obviously, no one knows)
Clausius–Clapeyron relation
(2) NEGATIVE FEEDBACK
Earth releases more heat as the surface warms (Stefan–Boltzmann law
(3) NEGATIVE FEEDDBACK
Earth evaporates more water as the surface warms: Evaporation cools the Earth’s surface
(4) Possible NEGATIVE FEEDBACK
Increasing advection of heat from the tropics to the poles” as Ethe greenhouse effect increases: Advection refers to the process where large-scale atmospheric and oceanic currents transport heat energy from the equatorial regions (tropics) towards the polar regions, essentially balancing the uneven distribution of solar radiation across the Earth’s surface, thus moderating climates at both extremes.
HITRAN and MODTRAN do not give the “warming effect”. They give radiative values that can be used in models to estimate a “warming effect”. As your response indicates, models make assumptions of feedback effects. The accuracy of these models are what is suspect, not the radiative values.
I recall this quote: Models are always wrong, but sometimes they are useful.
Copy-pasted suppositories.
ZERO EVIDENCE of CO2 causing warming.
RE: Positive Water Feedback.
This is nonsense! About 71% of the earth’s surface is covered with H2O and it does need not any help from CO2. Moreover, the wind is a major force that transports water out of the oceans onto and into land.
Lol.
Almost certainly a negative feedback, countering any theoretical CO2 warming.
YAWN.. RG goes on another little anti-science AGW-cult rant.
Warming by atmospheric CO2 has NEVER been observed or measured on this planet.
Still waiting for you to produce some empirical scientific evidence.
Still waiting for you to show us the CO2 warming in the UAH data.
Everything you type is scientific nonsense.
Except in the vacuum inside RG’s head.
Don’t be ridiculous. Many types of IR sensors are adjusted for relative humidity. The “heating” of the air is just the loss of energy between source and sensor.
I have read multiple explanations of what GWP is, and everytime I do, I get dumber.
Putting aside exactly what it means for the moment, they only pull that metric out with methane. When they talk CO2 they talk watts per meter squared and positive feedbacks and from time to time they admit CO2 is logarithmic. Change the conversation to CH4 and its… Well, did you know it has a GWP of 28? It feels like a shell game even without bothering to delve into exactly what this GWP thing is.
Plus ten for that comment.
“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”
In the new post-logic, ‘feelings-driven’ world, the shouty people are masters of the words.
Methane is 28 times stronger than CO2 as a greenhouse gas. But it’s effect on global warming is tiny because:
(1) The CH4 quantity is very small
(2) The CH4 half life is only 9 years
(3) Water vapor warming wavelengths overlap CH4 warming wavelengths
As a result, the actual warming effect of CH4 on atmospheric temperature is probably too small to measure.
Fixed for you.
” too small to measure.”
Just like CO2….. which is why you are incapable of producing any empirical scientific evidence of warming by atmospheric .
Immeasurable…. possibly does not even exist except in theory and the minds of AGW-cultists..
Beat me to it. Ask RG why the disparity between ECS ”estimates” is in fact growing and not shrinking.
Not worth asking RG anything… his mind is stuck in the AGW quicksand.
I have asked RG hundreds of times for actual empirical scientific evidence to back his conjectures.
Zero, Nada, Nil, Zip !!
Houghton came up with the GWP as a measurement for rating the relative effect of “forever gases” such as chlorofluorocarbons compared to the same mass of plain old CO2. When used for gases that have a natural production/destruction flux, such as methane, the method has little value other than indicating how “bad” an increase might be if there was no drive to equilibrium.
There you have it. 40 years is a lifetime of work, that monitoring. Good thing we finally found out its microbes and not people causing the increase of CH4.
Since microbes are natural, there is nothing further that can be done. Disband the methane monitoring Laboratory and use the budget for more important research.
BUT, they claim “sources such as wetlands, waste, and agriculture” are responsible. What is the role of microbial life in the oceans?/
I recall are a report that lots of methane seeps from the ocean floors. In cold water and at high pressure methane forms a clathrate known as methane ice. There huge amounts of methane ice on floors of cold oceans.
Looks like the composition of the atmosphere is actually quite variable as a result of natural changes in temperature.
The ice cores simply do not capture the extent of such changes so it has all come as a surprise.
What an absolute disaster for the planet. Biological productivity exploding means the Earth can feed a lot more people who will aspire to enrich their lives with worldly possession consuming the natural fuels in ever increasing quantity.
So sad that humans have inadvertently made Earth far more habitable.
It took woody plants 50M years to exhaust the available CO2 to a survival level and humans are restoring the balance almost as fast as it was depleted. I expect there will be a new balance around 700ppm of CO2 if we leave room for the biomass to expand. Australia and Sahara are going to be major beneficiaries of the growing abundance.
Of course we could prevent this abundance of biomass by covering as much land as available with solar panels, wind turbines and power transmission towers. We need to cover the ground with hard, impenetrable surfaces to stop moisture getting into the ground; then still the air so less moisture comes in from the oceans and present any trees from taking root in any remaining open spaces. That way we can reduce Earth to the lunar landscape that so many crave.
But, that would please the Greens as the world now would be unchanging.
700 ppm by 2100 is what the numbers from NOAA tell us. Here’s a graph hot off the press:
Ah! A down vote (-:
It deserves a down vote as it doesn’t explain that each plotted point
is the average CO2 concentration for the previous ten years.
Stuff Hot Off The Press tend to have errors.
Nor does it offer any explanation as to why either a quadratic or a linear model should apply, especially all the way out to 2100.
If the earth is rapidly greening, wouldn’t the plants continue to use more and more CO2? Is this positive feedback for the plants?
Harold the Really Old Organic Chemist Says:
ATTN: Everyone
RE: Please, No More of This Methane Nonsense!
The GML reports that the concentration of methane in dry air as 1,292 ppb. This is
1.292 ppm Why did they use ppb instead of ppm? Because it makes methane look like a really “menacing molecule”.
At present concentration, one cubic meter of air contains 0.0009 grams of methane. One cubic meter of dry air has a mass 1.29 kg.
The reason for the low concentration of methane in air is due to the discharges of lightning which initiates its combustion. Every day there are many thousands of lightning discharges especially in the tropics.
Methane has slightly soluble in cold water. One liter ice-cold water can contain 35 mls of methane. That is not very much but the cold oceans are enormous. Methane eventually diffuses down to bottom of the ocean. There in the cold and high pressure, it can form a clathrate known as methane ice.
The big engines of jet planes and all vehicles with ice’s burn up some methane as does forest fires.
We really do not have to worry about methane.
Sorry, but atmospheric methane concentration is the second largest driver of global warming.
So how much warming is methane going to cause by 2100?
Now a third time you say something with ZERO evidence, most here already know your statement is false because CH4 is long known as a negligible IR absorber being in the low energy part of the IR window.
CH4 is … in the low energy part of the IR window.
_________________________________________
BINGO!
That’s right 15 microns. A black body that radiates at 15 microns
would have a temperature similar to that of a brick of dry ice.
That is the claim by the IPCC, a political organization that does do no research.
What global warming? NASA reports a 1.4 deg C of warning since the pre-industrial period. So what. After winter, come back here and tell us if you have experienced climate change.
There was article recently posted here that reports about the
problems and errors in these temperature measurements.
I stand by what I stated. Methane at 1 mg per cubic meter air can cause no measurable warning of air.
“is the second largest driver of global warming.”
More scientifically unsubstantiated BS.
There is no evidence it has any warming effect whatsoever.
If you think there is , please present the empirical scientific evidence.
Mr Beet on is opinion , not fact, in his posts .
They like to just skip over that part and run straight to the nail biting stage.
Imagine having a lawyer defending you with that technique.
Impossible. Water vapor is the number 1 greenhouse gas.
So you’re now telling me that CH4 is a larger driver of global warming than CO2?
Nice, proving that Beeton should really be totally ignored.
H2O is the Guerilla Greenhouse Gas and stomps all over CO2!
I think (even though he may not realize it) that he means ”additional warming” regardless of whether even that is impossible to measure.
As I mentioned methane at about 0.0009 g per cubic meter of can not heat up 1.29 kg of air at STP.
What global warming? NASA reports a increase of global temp of 1.4 deg C since pre industrial era. I don’t call that global warming.
Keep in mind that IPCC is political organization and does no research. Much of what they say is speculation and should be taken with lots of salt
Figures lie and liars figure.
1) At best it is third largest, behind H2O and maybe CO2.
2) Being in second or third place doesn’t provide any quantitative analysis about it’s warming potential.
3) As HP points out, at ~1.3 ppm and 28 times potential it is only equivalent to 1.3 • 28 = 36 ppm of CO2.
Nope. Please note last sentence. Up to 67% of the claimed 33 K is water vapor with CO2 getting blamed for most of the rest. CH4 not so much.
Atmospheric gases only absorb some wavelengths of energy but are transparent to others. The absorption patterns of water vapor (blue peaks) and carbon dioxide (pink peaks) overlap in some wavelengths.[33]
Water vapor is the most important greenhouse gas overall, being responsible for 41–67% of the greenhouse effect,[31][32] but its global concentrations are not directly affected by human activity.
This chart shows approx. 100ppm per square. CH4 is one one-hundredth of a square.
I report a massive mistake. I transposed the numbers for the concentration of methane in air. The correct concentration for methane in air is 1.922 ppmv not 1.292 ppmv. One cubic meter of dry air has 1.37 mg of methane at STP.
Termites! Increased carbohydrate from CO2 greening creates increase in food supply for insects, animals and fungi.
“Methane (CH4) is the second-most abundant anthropogenic greenhouse gas and has global warming potential (GWP) of 28 over 100 y (1);”
Really? Second?
Since water is the most abundant, and most effective, greenhouse gas (and possibly the only one that has a noticeable effect), then CO2 is a complete non-player?
OK!
(Some ‘scientists’ obviously need to learn some real science, like physics!)
Water vapor isn’t considered an anthropogenic greenhouse gas.
Why not? Humans mine “fossil water” everywhere on earth and dump it on the ground where it evaporates and heads into the atmosphere.
True, but that’s because the warmongers don’t want to reveal just how shakey their doom-mongering really is. If we only considered anthropogenic gases, we really would be down to a minuscule effect on temperature.
But they haven’t started blaming humans for water vapor (yet).
They will! Try breathing on to a cold surface…
I whole heartly agree! There is only about 0.8 g of CO2 per cubic meter of air. One cubic meter of air at 70 deg. F and with 70% RH has 14.3 g of H20.
For livestock methane “emissions”, I always wonder whether the calculations for these include that if the grass that the livestock eat were not eaten by said livestock, that it would die and be decomposed by bacteria in the soil, converting a portion of it into CO2 and methane. The determination that livestock methane emissions are some significant problem (requiring massive changes, or even the elimination of livestock farming) seem to be looking at only one small part of a larger cycle. The food that these animals eat is created by plants pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere, so any emissions are in effect just re-emission of recently sequestered CO2 (methane rapidly breaks down in the atmosphere into CO2 and water).
Livestock industries around the world are being needlessly crippled by this lunacy.
Every organism with an alimentary canal emits methane. Liberals don’t like cattle and red meat. They don’t like dairy farms and claim to be lactose intolerant. They don’t like feed lots, cowboys and especially John Wayne.
And they all suffer from Celiac disease which prevents them from eating gluten.
Celiac is real, but then I know my share of liberals that don’t have it and claim they feel better if they don’t eat wheat.
Flatulence studies have determined a vegetarian diet produces more methane than a meat diet.
It is a physical and chemical FACT that no animal can produce more “carbon” output than it takes in.
ALL animals are carbon neutral.
Shhh, stop ruining the narrative. Carbon is to be detested and then taxed, just as alcohol, tobacco and other recreational drugs are. Remember, taxing oppressively is the only way government can get its agenda across to stubborn humans who won’t listen to reason.
Methane emitted by animals has a very short life in the atmosphere.
Lightning reduces methane to CO2 and H20 and that feeds the plants that feed the cattle.
It is in equilibrium and the livestock population has been stable for a long time.
Beef methane is at net zero (aka equilibrium).
A large portion of emitted methane is absorbed by water such as ice cold polar water.
Animals are not carbon neutral. For example, the average human exhales about one pound of CO2 per day. That is ca. 8 billion pounds per day for the humans.
All the CO2 produced in the life cycles of the plants and animals does not contribute global warming since it is constantly being recycled.
Sorry Harold you are mistaken.
Animals, that includes humans, can ONLY put out that CO2 because they get it from eating foods containing “carbon” which has been taken from the atmosphere by plants.
No more “carbon” out, than “carbon” in. => carbon neutral.
In fact, while the animal is alive, there is considerably less “carbon” out than “carbon” in, because a large amount of “carbon” is temporarily sequestered as the body’ structure…. bones, tissue, organs etc.
They cannot “add” or “create” carbon ..
The chemical balance of “carbon” over the lifetime of an animal’s existence and eventual being eaten or decaying is ZERO.
A large portion of food is metabolized to produce energy for the mechanical operation of body organs such as the heart, lungs, intestines and muscles. Metabolic energy is used by the nerves, eyes, nose, kidneys, etc. and for body heat. Here are losses of carbon: cut hair, nail clippings and shredded skin cells. Thus, a human is emitter of CO2 and carbon in combined forms, but does create any carbon.
Here is a new take on the carbon. Food is a high energy form of carbon. Humans eat the food and metabolic processes extracts the energy for use
by the body and then excrete a low energy form
of carbon i.e. CO2.
There is one situation where a human is not carbon neutral: he gains weight.
Without livestock we would me waste high in deadgrass that would become a extreame fire risk at the first peroid of dry weather as well as rot down to produce methane in damp conditions as you have stated
Save the cows !!!
Cows can be beneficial to the environment in a number of ways, including:
Carbon recycling: Cows are part of a natural carbon cycle. They consume plants that extract nutrients from the soil, and then deposit those nutrients back into the soil through manure. The methane that cows emit breaks down into carbon dioxide and water, which plants can use.
Soil health: Grazing can help restore soil health by creating a sink for atmospheric carbon and nitrogen.
Grassland health: Grazing helps maintain the health of grasslands.
Wildlife habitat: Grazing preserves open space and wildlife habitat.
Fire reduction: Cows can eat invasive weeds before they become a problem and fuel for fires.
Protein: Beef cattle can convert forages into a high-quality protein for human consumption.
Will you please stop with all these accurate statements!
You might convince someone to become un-green (red?) and that is against the plan.
It seems to me quite logical. The Earth is greening due to the increase of CO2 which is also positive for crop yields. This also leads to more decaying biomass… and more methane. It’s a trace gas anyway, with a short half-life. I don’t see the problem, since its concentration is very low anyway.
An estimated 60% of today’s methane emissions are the result of human activities. The largest sources of methane are agriculture, fossil fuels, and decomposition of landfill waste. Natural processes account for 40% of methane emissions, with wetlands being the largest natural source.
If the paper denies those facts, then it is wrong.
Estimated.
Ok.
A fantasy, you mean. If you pretend something is a fact, you are usually wrong.
It is IRRELEVANT because CH4 is a negligible warm forcer which is why the IPPC rarely talks about it.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Global Monitoring Laboratory (NOAA/GML) has been carefully
monitoring the global CH4 burdenwasting time, money and resources through the Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network (GGGRN) for over four decades.FIFY
Methane has little to no effect on temperature and certainly none that can be measured. The alarmists push it into the narrative because it pulls a lot of nut job activists into their anti-human coalition and irrespective of the damage it does to the credibility of the “scientists” who espouse the Cause.
These “scientists” are also known as welfare queens in white coats living off government research grant money in the academic ghetto.
Does this mean that dairy cows in Ireland and elsewhere are saved, at least for now?
https://www.ft.com/content/4028ae15-fea2-48fb-bcdb-228f61e1b098
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/irelands-bonkers-plan-to-kill-cows-to-save-the-planet/
When the data centres are consuming 70% of Ireland’s electricity by 2030 will the dairy cows be able to be milked? 🙂
“…These measurements show that the record-high CH4 growth in 2020–2022 was accompanied by a sharp decline in δ13CCH4, indicating that the increase in CH4 abundance was mainly driven by increased emissions from microbial sources such as wetlands, waste, and agriculture…”
Two things.
For some time now there’s been a big push here in the US to preserve and even increase wetlands.
Do they know what the methane levels were back before things like, say, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Black_Swamp
were drained?
Methane (CH4) is the second-most abundant anthropogenic greenhouse gas. Humans generate a lot of water vapor burning fossil fuels
For CH4 the sums are twice the number of moles of CO2 as water, but 36/44ths the mass. For octane we have C8H18, so the molar ratio is 9/8ths the number of moles of CO2 as water. Some of the water may condense out in cooling towers and exhaust systems rather than directly entering the atmosphere in the gas phase.