The energy-conservation framework of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Sixth Assessment Report was used to estimate the impact of the leaked methane.
Two pipes for transferring natural gas from Russia to Germany were deliberately rupturing. Methane escaped into the ocean and was then released into the atmosphere.
The second most abundant greenhouse gas is methane. The impact of this incident on the climate became a key concern worldwide. There was no quantitative conclusion made in the news article.
The Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences used the energy-conservation framework of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Sixth Assessment Report to estimate the impact of the leaked methane. Their work has been published in a journal.
The earliest estimates of the amount of leaked methane in the world's media were up to half a million tons. The amount of methane that leaked was likely to be less than first thought. A team from Nanjing University in China provided a more accurate estimate of 0.22 0.03 Mt by using multiple observations including those from high-resolution satellites.
The Aliso Canyon accident in California in 2015 was the largest methane emission in human history. The annual emissions of methane from the oil and gas sectors were as high as 70 Mt. The leaked methane was equivalent to a single day's worth of emissions from these industries.
The 10-year lifetime is short-lived compared to CO 2 due to the gradual removal of methane by reacting with certain radicals. The time horizon affects the impact of methane on the climate. The researchers used the concept of global warming potential to make an indirect estimate. The amount of heat accumulated per unit mass of methane in the next 20 years is more than the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
The impact of the leaked methane on the climate is equivalent to that of 20.6 Mt of CO 2, which would raise the atmospheric CO 2 concentration by less than one tenth of a percentage point. In theory, the global mean surface air temperature would increase by 1010 5 C if the effective radiative forcing under doubled CO 2 is included.
Dr. Xiaolong Chen is the first author of the study The second largest driver of global warming is methane emissions from multiple sectors of agriculture and industry. Damage to infrastructure such as this should be avoided so that we can better control and reduce methane emissions if we achieve the warming target of below 1.5C or 2C set out in the Paris Agreement.
The Advances in Atmospheric Sciences is available.
Journal information: Advances in Atmospheric Sciences , Nature
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