If you have If you’ve heard of a clay mineral called zeolite, chances are you share a house with a cat. You may also know that it comes in powder form and is great at removing liquids and odors—ideal for masking minor annoyances as a cat. Desirée Plata, a professor of civil engineering at MIT, uses zeolites for a different kind of molecular cleaning: Combining it with a metal catalyst — in Plata’s case, copper — adds some heat. , and it will trap and destroy methaneone of the most potent greenhouse gases.
Methane is a fast heating agent. Unlike carbon dioxide, which stays in the atmosphere for thousands of years, natural forces remove it within about a decade, mostly when it reacts with other molecules in the air. But in a short time, methane mixed overhead, which far outstrips its weight, creating a warming effect 80 times that of carbon dioxide within 20 years. Via some estimates, it has caused a third of anthropogenic warming to date, despite receiving much less attention. It is also notoriously difficult to keep track of where the gas is coming from. Some methane is trapped underground and then unbound by natural or man-made cracks drilled into the ground for oil — or for the methane itself, under add anodyne name “nature Air.” But it can also be made again by microorganisms anywhere there is a lot of biomass and very little oxygen: rice fields, Landfills, land full of wateror inside the cow’s digestive tract.
Over the past few years, atmospheric methane concentrations have spiked, confusing and alarming climate scientists. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, measurements from 2021 are poised to show the largest increase since scientists began measuring the gas consistently. (It takes several months to catch up to the data.) Is it a blip or a sustained increase caused by certain sources of emissions? Or perhaps something else has changed in the gas mixture in the atmosphere, so that the methane is less destroyed than before? “I don’t know” is the honest answer, says Rob Jackson, a climate scientist who studies methane at Stanford University. “The increase in concentration is scary. And if they continue, this is terrible news.”
What is clear is that the world’s top priority needs to be cutting methane emissions, added Jackson. Sometimes it’s as simple as turning a screw in a leaky pipe valve or plugging into a defunct gas well. But there are limits to that defined strategy. With CO2, starting a so-called “supergeneration” is as simple as scanning the horizon for the chimneys of a coal-fired power plant. But comparable sources of methane emissions are often more sporadic – pipe leaks here, landfills there – a game of fishing for environmental watchdogs constrained by limited oversight. regime. The accountability is also complex: The methane emissions of a particular herd cannot be measured consistently as CO2 spewed by a highway full of cars.
Natural emissions, estimated to be around 40% of methane emissions, are even more complex, and they are likely to accelerate as the world warms, in part by triggering gas-emitting microbes. living in permenent ice or beneath sea ice. “The problem with natural emissions is that there’s not much we can do about them,” says Jackson. “It’s hard to estimate Chesapeake Bay’s emissions, or worse, to measure what would happen if the Arctic began to melt. It’s to get the genie out of the bottle, and can’t get it back.”
So perhaps, Jackson and other scientists suggest, it’s time to think about remove methane from the atmosphere, in addition to cutting new emissions. That’s an idea that’s much more advanced for carbon dioxide — and perhaps with good reason, for CO2 is the leading cause of warming and humanity will live with CO today2 emissions for thousands of years. But with methane, proponents say there’s a good reason for quick action — a chance to return to pre-industrial levels within decades, thanks to its short lifespan. Jackson and other scientists have argued that The heating effect of methane is chronically underestimated, because current climate policies emphasize long-term temperature targets that go beyond the lifetime of the methane molecule. The value of reducing methane levels spikes when you factor in the benefits of preventing warming The current.
