U.S. Climate-Changing Emissions Drastically Underestimated

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=16-P13-00009&segmentID=3

[font face=Serif][font size=5]U.S. Climate-Changing Emissions Drastically Underestimated[/font]

[font size=4]Air Date: Week of February 26, 2016[/font]

http://loe.org/content/2016-02-26/loe_160226_b1_methane.mp3

Rising methane emissions across midwestern US (Photo: Courtesy of Dr. Jacob)

[font size=3]Measuring the emissions of the powerful climate-changing gas methane emissions is difficult, as it escapes from wetlands and landfills as well as from oil and gas drilling and pipelines around the world. Now, a team of scientists using satellite data with ground observations has found a better way to calculate its presence. Daniel Jacob, Harvard professor of Atmospheric Chemistry and Environmental Engineering, tells host Steve Curwood their recent study suggests much more methane is escaping than estimates had calculated, and the US could be responsible for up to 60 percent of the extra.

[font size=4]Transcript[/font]

CURWOOD: It’s Living on Earth. I’m Steve Curwood. When the global warming gas methane is first emitted, it’s roughly 90 times as powerful as carbon dioxide, and there’s more than twice as much of it in the atmosphere now than there was before the start of the industrial revolution.

There are many sources – wetlands, agriculture, landfills, and of course, oil and gas production — and the recent massive natural gas leak near Los Angeles drew attention to the environmental impact of methane.

Now a new study from Harvard University, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, documents a spike in global methane emissions to levels far higher than previous federal estimates.

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[Hydra]

1. I know something huge is in play, this may be part of it

The last few years where I live have been a constant 10 degrees hotter than they were 10-20 years ago. It's not a fluke, and it isn't going away.

Something is going on to push the warming cycle faster than we ever feared to believe. Are we already past the tipping point and into a feedback loop? Hard to say we aren't...

[Ike Y]

2. The Fix is In

Don't you worry about that!

[NickB79]

3. Anyone remember this?

http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2011/04/11/11greenwire-shale-gas-isnt-cleaner-than-coal-cornell-resea-38125.html

"Compared to coal, the footprint of shale gas is at least 20 percent greater and perhaps more than twice as great on the 20-year horizon and is comparable when compared over 100 years," states a pre-publication copy (pdf) of the study, which is slated to be published in the journal Climatic Science and originally obtained by The Hill newspaper.

Howarth and his fellow Cornell professors, Renee Santoro and Anthony Ingraffea, found the process of "hydraulic fracturing," which is required to extract gas from shale, emits enough methane to make it dirtier than coal. Methane is a greenhouse gas that is more potent than carbon dioxide but does not last as long in the atmosphere.

See also: http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2011/04/fracking-leaks-may-make-gas-dirtier-coal