Methane and the greenhouse effect: the first direct evidence

We often hear that methane is a greenhouse gas 25 times more powerful than CO 2 . However, no direct measure of the phenomenon had yet been realized. Today, thanks to American researchers, it's finally done.

"For a long time, laboratory measurements, theories and models have led us to suspect that methane is a major greenhouse effect , " says Dan Feldman, a researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (USA). United). "Today, we bring an experimental proof. "

Remember that some gases absorb a greater or lesser part of the energy emitted by the Earth , thus retaining heat in the atmosphere . We are talking about greenhouse gases . As their atmospheric concentration increases, the greenhouse effect is expected to increase as well. However, in the case of methane , the phenomenon had never been observed outside the laboratory.

This graph shows the methane greenhouse effect measured over 10 years at a site in northern Oklahoma (USA). It is to be compared with the known fact that methane concentrations in the atmosphere were stable in the early 2000s and then increased. © Berkeley Lab

Better understand the link between greenhouse gases and global

Thanks to particularly accurate measurements and decades of expertise, Berkeley Lab scientists have finally been able to measure directly how increasing methane concentrations in our atmosphere are leading to a growing greenhouse effect.

For this, they focused on particular wavelengths on which methane is said to exert its effect. To avoid errors, they have also relied on parallel measurements of possible confounding factors such as water vapor . Their results should provide a better understanding of the relationship between the atmospheric concentration of different greenhouse gases and global warming .

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2ro5k9
How does the greenhouse effect work? We have been talking a lot about greenhouse gases and global warming in recent years, but do you know exactly how the phenomenon is going? Unisciel and the University of Lille tell us more about this episode of Kézako.

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