Hit the gas Can cutting methane save us from disaster?

For two years, the world has seen temperatures exceed the 1.5C heating limit laid out in the Paris climate agreement. This overshooting will have “devastating consequences”, the UN secretary-general António Guterres warned.

- Fiona Harvey BELÉM

The biggest worry for scientists is that further heating could trigger irreversible tipping points, such as the widespread drying out and dying off of the Amazon, or the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, beyond which climate breakdown could spiral out of control.

For the UN, and the world, minimising and, if possible, reversing that “overshoot” must now be the priority. But shifting the world’s energy systems to burn less fossil fuel is taking decades, time we no longer have to spare. Some scientists believe the answer lies elsewhere: with the powerful greenhouse gas methane.

“Cutting methane is the single most important strategy to slow near term warming,” said Durwood Zaelke, the president of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development, and a longtime advocate of action on methane. “In fact, it’s the only strategy that has a chance of working. Cutting carbon dioxide is a marathon, but methane is a sprint." Methane, the main component of the natural gas that is burned for fuel, is produced by natural and humanmade processes, including leaky oil and gas infrastructure, livestock, and the rotting of organic material. Once in the atmosphere, it is about 80 times more powerful in trapping heat than carbon dioxide, but has a shorter life, breaking down in about 20 years.

Scientists estimate that methane alone has driven at least a third of the warming in recent years. New satellites and detection systems have revealed an unexpected truth: many countries have been massively underreporting their methane emissions, and the quantities of the gas being poured into the atmosphere have been climbing strongly, even while carbon dioxide output has been slowing.

Cutting methane would give the planet essential breathing space.