Methane And Climate Change

In the last 100 years, the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has increased, causing the Earth to warm by an average of 0.6 degrees celsius, largely a result of burning fossil fuels for energy, transportation, and land use changes increased for food production. The basic science is straightforward and climate researchers have shown that gases such as carbon dioxide, methane and others can trap heat in the Earth’s atmosphere, causing a phenomenon known as the greenhouse effect. Human activities such as industry, transport, energy generation and deforestation all produce these greenhouse gases. In the last 20 years, concern has grown that global warming is inevitable and now considered most probably caused by man-made increases in

Methane has a global warming potential 20 times higher than carbon dioxide. ”("5 Ways Factory Farming Is Killing the Environment.") The farms are a threat to the very planet we live on.

Damon Matthews, a professor in Concordia University’s Department of Geography, found a direct connection between carbon dioxide and global warming. Matthew’s studies show that same global temperature increase, regardless of when or over what period of time the emission occurs. The effect of adding more carbon dioxide is predicted in the theory of greenhouse gases. Swedish scientist, Syante Arrhenius, first proposed the theory in 1896, based on earlier work by Fourier and Tyndall. At the same time, many scientists have reached the same conclusion. If we increase the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the Earth’s temperature will increase. Energy is absorbed from the sun in the form of visible light and ultraviolet radiation. The earth then releases some of this energy as infrared radiation. Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere captures some of this heat, then re-emit it in all directions. During this process, carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases keep the Earth’s surface 33 degree Celsius warmer than it would be without them. According to an ongoing temperature analysis conducted by a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), the average global temperature on Earth has increased by about 0.8 degree Celsius. Since 1975, two-thirds of the warming has occurred at a rate of roughly 0.15-0.20 degree Celsius per decade.

Officials in the Obama administration are nearly ready to unveil their unprecedented regulation of the oil and gas industries by ordering the reduction of methane emissions in the United States by 40 to 45 percent within the next ten years. Such a drastic alteration would significantly change how natural gas is produced and consumed and transform the entire electric industry in the country, potentially shifting its reliance on fossil fuels to renewable sources of energy. Though methane constitutes only nine percent of emissions, far less than carbon dioxide, it has over twenty times the effect toward global warming as carbon dioxide has and is therefore important to regulate. Also, the Obama administration has initiated reductions in emission

Greenhouse gases are accumulating and the dominant cause seems to be the “fossil-fuel-based human economy” (Goodland 604). Greenhouse gases are accumulating in the atmosphere and fast; greenhouse gases include the release of carbon dioxide from burning coal, natural gas, and

In the world today, global warming and climate change are one of the main issues with the earth. This issue affects everyone and everything in this world, and even though it seems to be a big problem, most people do not seem to care. The most familiar term is global warming and climate change, but greenhouse gases is one of the main causes and is never mentioned. Greenhouse gases are gases that absorb and emit radiation in the atmosphere, hence makes the earth warmer. The importance of this knowledge of greenhouse gases is so the world will know one of the main causes of global warming and climate change and possibly some

According to Krupp methane pollution is responsible of 25% of the warming our planet and it is 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide over the short term. And that’s why methane leaks should have more media attention, maybe it’s not as destructive as a war happening someplace, but it’s damaging our atmosphere and polluting

This dramatic increase is mainly due to human activities; such as, fossil fuel combustion in the coal mines or

What we ought to be agonized over now is that in the course of recent years, we have been falsely raising the grouping of nursery gasses in our climate. Production lines, power plants, and autos, smolder coal and fuel and release an apparently perpetual stream of carbon dioxide. Power plants are the biggest patrons to an Earth-wide temperature boost. Consistently they deliver around 2.5 billion tons of contamination. The second driving reason for this contamination is cars, which pumps around 1.4 billion tons of contamination into the environment every year. Notwithstanding these, we as a human race produce a great many pounds of methane by permitting

Professor Robert Howarth found out that 8% of the methane extractions contribute to 44% of global warming.

“Over 37 percent of methane emissions result from factory farming. Methane has a global warming potential 20 times higher than carbon dioxide.”(Onegreenplanet)

Methane is a natural gas and as such is a large component of greenhouse gases. Consequently, methane emissions in the atmosphere contribute greatly to not only an increase in ozone concentrations but subsequently a rise in global temperature. Therefore, it is critical that accurate measurements of methane loss to the ozone layer be measured in order to develop effective programs with the primary aim of lowering natural gas emissions. This study suggests that current methods of measuring methane emissions may be inaccurate. The results revealed that the annual natural gas emissions in the Boston region totalled 2.7 ± 0.6% (worth approximately 90 million dollars) which conflicts with the Massachusetts Greenhouse Gas Inventory estimate of 1.1% natural gas emission rate in the region. This suggests that urban regions such as Boston may be seriously underestimating their methane emission rate as outlined by various authority departments. This research is significant as many other studies have not encompassed the downstream components (such as distribution) of methane emissions, as the main focus is presently on production. This shows that distribution may be a much larger influencing factor than previously anticipated.

What is of effects of deep solar minimum, most especially, 2007-2009, on the energy budget of climate system?

The concept of global warming has become one of the most widely debated and controversial topics of our time. Scientists learned long ago that the earth’s climate has powerfully shaped the history of humanity. However, it is only in the past few decades that research has revealed that humans have a significant influence on the climate as well. A growing body of scientific evidence indicates that since 1950, the world’s climate has been warming, primarily as a result of emissions from the burning of fossil fuels and the destruction of tropical forests. More importantly, an article titled "Global Warming" published in the New York Times shows that methane, a gas that is emitted from landfills, livestock and oil gas facilities,

The issue of global warming should be on the list of our top priorities. Studies show that the average of global temperatures have risen since the Industrial Revolution began. Since the Industrial Revolution, human emissions has quadrupled the frequency of certain heat extremes and many scientists have warned that a failure to bring greenhouse gases under control could eventually lead to a 62-fold increase in extreme heat blasts (Gillis Justin A17). Most of the increase is due to human activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation. These activities contribute to a build-up in carbon dioxide and other gases in Earth’s atmosphere. The Earth’s atmosphere is made of gases like nitrogen, carbon dioxide and oxygen. These gases act as a blanket that covers and gives us warmth, but once these gases such as carbon dioxide absorbs heat, but does not release it back into space in which causes the increase in global temperature. This is called the greenhouse effect because it only traps heat but does not release it.