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Many of today’s geoscientists are carbon voyeurs. Knowing that human disregard for the carbon cycle has screwed the climate, they have kept a close eye on carbon s hottest variants carbon dioxide (CO
2) and methane. Both gasses trap heat on the planet through the greenhouse effect, and over a span of 100 years methane is 28 times more potent than CO
2. Rigorously accounting for greenhouse gas flow is step one of building models that predict the future climate.
Some line items in the methane budget, such as pipeline leaks and cowfarts, are well understood. But others are hazier. “There s lots of gaps and uncertainties, particularly in wetlands, and inland waters,” says Luke Jeffrey, a biogeochemistry postdoc at Southern Cross University in Australia. By one 2020 tally from the Global Carbon Project, wetlands emit about 20 to 31 percent of Earth’s annual methane release more than the amount from fossil fuel
Washington [US], April 11 (ANI): Atmospheric methane has tripled since pre-industrial times. It traps heat far more effectively than carbon dioxide and accounts for 25 per cent of atmospheric warming to date, and much of that methane is coming from aquatic ecosystems, with human activities contributing to the emissions levels, a new paper published in Nature Geoscience has found.