And then there is this. The rate of increase in atmospheric methane has been rising since the mid-2000s. The curve is becoming ever steeper.
Surprisingly perhaps, it’s not from natural gas producers, industry, or vehicles. Not even cow farts.
It’s apparently in large part coming from tropical wetlands. Climate change is still indirectly responsible as it is the changing climate that changes the vegetation that, in turn, results in more methane production. But the consequences of this rise in methane levels can dwarf anything CO2 will do. A “termination-level” event, they call it, which sounds alarming and it should be: even though it does not mean our immediate termination, it may mark the termination of an epoch, just as in the past, when similar rises in methane events marked the end of the ice ages. Except that there’s no ice age at present.