{"id":1921,"date":"2009-11-29T18:58:34","date_gmt":"2009-11-29T18:58:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theothersideofeverything.com\/flip\/2009\/11\/methane-the-other-greenhouse-gas\/"},"modified":"2009-11-29T22:50:12","modified_gmt":"2009-11-29T22:50:12","slug":"methane-the-other-greenhouse-gas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theothersideofeverything.com\/flip\/2009\/11\/methane-the-other-greenhouse-gas\/","title":{"rendered":"Methane: The Other Greenhouse Gas"},"content":{"rendered":"

As the world struggles to make political sense of collective environmental guardianship, with so much focus on carbon dioxide produced by humans burning fossil fuels, very little attention is being to methane. Yet, methane has a much greater impact on global warming than previously thought. As a greenhouse gas, it is thirty three times more damaging than CO2<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In September 2008, Rajendra Pachauri, who chairs the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) unpopularly called on populations to curb their meat eating habits<\/a>, for reasons of habitat loss, since carbon-storing forests are destroyed to provide land for grazing meat animals, as well as methane production from the animals themselves.<\/p>\n

“The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has estimated that direct emissions from meat production account for about 18% of the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions,” he said.<\/p>\n

Australian scientists<\/strong> have now said they are hoping to breed sheep that burp less as part of efforts to tackle climate change.<\/p>\n

The scientists have been trying to identify a genetic link that causes some sheep to belch less than others. Burping is a far greater cause of emissions in sheep than flatulence, they say.<\/p>\n

About 16% of Australia’s greenhouse emissions come from agriculture, says the department of climate change. Australia’s Sheep Cooperative Research Council says 66% of agricultural emissions are released as methane from the gut of livestock.<\/p>\n

“Ninety per cent of the methane that sheep and cattle and goats produce comes from the rumen, and that’s burped out,” John Goopy from the New South Wales Department of Industry and Investment told ABC.<\/p>\n

“Not much goes behind – that’s horses.” (BBC<\/a>)<\/p>\n

As the world warms, “locked up” methane is being released into the atmosphere and the oceans.<\/strong><\/p>\n

A 2006 study of the thawing Siberian tundra found that<\/a><\/p>\n

“…thawing permafrost along lake margins accounts for most of the methane released from the lakes, and estimate that an expansion of thaw lakes between 1974 and 2000, which was concurrent with regional warming, increased methane emissions in our study region by 58 per cent. Furthermore, the Pleistocene age (35,260-42,900 years) of methane emitted from hotspots along thawing lake margins indicates that this positive feedback to climate warming has led to the release of old carbon stocks previously stored in permafrost.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

British and German scientists have found methane seeping from the Arctic sea bed.<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Most of the methane reacts with the oxygen in the water to form carbon dioxide, another greenhouse gas. In sea water, this forms carbonic acid which adds to ocean acidification, with consequent problems for biodiversity.<\/p>\n

Professor Tim Minshull of the National Oceanography Centre at Southampton told BBC News: “We already knew there was some methane hydrate in the ocean off Spitsbergen and that’s an area where climate change is happening rather faster than just about anywhere else in the world.”<\/p>\n

Their most significant finding is that climate change means the gas is being released from more and deeper areas of the Arctic Ocean.<\/p>\n

Graham Westbrook, lead author and professor of geophysics at the University of Birmingham, said: “If this process becomes widespread along Arctic continental margins, tens of megatonnes of methane a year – equivalent to 5-10% of the total amount released globally by natural sources, could be released into the ocean.”<\/p>\n

Posted via email<\/a> from Preposterous Guru<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As the world struggles to make political sense of collective environmental guardianship, with so much focus on carbon dioxide produced by humans burning fossil fuels, very little attention is being to methane. Yet, methane has a much greater impact on global warming than previously thought. As a greenhouse gas, it is thirty three times more […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":126,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[330,1],"tags":[780],"class_list":["post-1921","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-living","category-funky-original","tag-funky-original"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theothersideofeverything.com\/flip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1921","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theothersideofeverything.com\/flip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theothersideofeverything.com\/flip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theothersideofeverything.com\/flip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/126"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theothersideofeverything.com\/flip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1921"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/theothersideofeverything.com\/flip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1921\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1927,"href":"https:\/\/theothersideofeverything.com\/flip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1921\/revisions\/1927"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theothersideofeverything.com\/flip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1921"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theothersideofeverything.com\/flip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1921"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theothersideofeverything.com\/flip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1921"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}