Sustainability: good news about methane

An unexpected piece of good news seems to have been little covered: the fact that the quantity of methane in the atmosphere has stopped rising, as the BBC reported the other day.

It sounds arcane but methane, which apparently arises from sources as rich and varied as

• melting Siberian permafrost
• gas production and
• both ends of the humble cow

is a potent greenhouse gas. Anyone who reads about sustainability will have come across stories about (for example) giant methane burps from the deep ocean ending life as we know it. Here's one. Methane is, we are told 21 times worse than an equivalent amount of CO2 and is responsible for 20% of all global warming, if you can rely on the climate models, which you can't.

Anyhow the good news is that, after rising to 150% of its pre-industrial levels, the global atmostpheric methane level hasn't budged for the past seven years, and may even start falling. This may even be a result of various conservation attempts over the years, including farmers bottling the stuff as it comes out of cows (let's not picture this in our minds) and then selling it or using to power their milking parlours.

Not, in other words, like this cartoon:

Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.