‘Nobody ever saw anything like this before’: how methane emissions are pushing the Amazon towards environmental catastrophe

Schwartzreport · 2 years ago · 89 views

,    -  The Guardian (U.K.) Stephan: Yet another tale of human stupidity and greed. Until we get universal agreement that climate change must be stopped and that methane production must end, we are not going to deal with climate change productively, as this report describes. Climate change is not just a national problem, it is a planetary problem that must be addressed as a planetary problem, but the governments of humanity can't seem to understand that, nor do they seem to be capable of developing the courage and discipline to overcome the greed that dooms us. An aerial view of a fire in the Amazon rainforest in northern Brazil, which experienced a severe drought last year. Credit: Michael Dantas / AFP / Getty Controlling methane provides our best, and perhaps only, lever for shaving peak global temperatures over the next few decades. This is because it’s cleansed from the air naturally only a decade or so after release. Therefore if we could eliminate all methane emissions from human activities, methane’s concentration would quickly return to pre-industrial levels. Essentially, humans have released in excess of 3bn tonnes of methane into the atmosphere in the past 20 years. Quashing those emissions within a decade or two would save us 0.5C of warming. No other greenhouse gas gives us this much power to slow the climate crisis. If the Earth keeps warming, though, reducing emissions from human activities may not be enough. We may also need to counter higher methane emissions in nature, including from warming tropical wetlands and thawing Arctic permafrost. The highest natural methane emissions come from wetlands and seasonally flooded forests in the tropics [...]