Greenhouse Gases We Overlook
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Researchers around the world set to work unraveling the mystery, reviewing readings from satellites, aircraft, and greenhouse gas monitoring stations. They eventually identified a clear pattern: Methane emissions had increased sharply across the tropics, where wetlands were becoming wetter and warmer. This created optimal conditions for microbes that thrive in anaerobic muck, which consumed more carbon-rich organic matter and released more methane as a by-product. (Reduced pollution from nitrogen oxides, which help break down methane in the atmosphere, also likely played a substantial role.)
The findings offer one of the clearest cases so far where climate change itself drives additional greenhouse gas emissions from natural systems, triggering a feedback effect that threatens to produce more warming, more emissions, and an ongoing cycle.
There are numerous additional ways this is happening or soon could, including wildfires and thawing permafrost. These are significant emission sources that aren’t included in the commitments nations have made under the Paris climate agreement—and climate risks that largely aren’t accounted for in the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s most recent warming scenarios.
Spark Climate Solutions hopes to change that. The nonprofit is launching a model intercomparison project, in which different research teams will run the same set of experiments on various models across a range of emissions scenarios to determine how climate change could unfold. This initiative will specifically explore how a variety of climate feedback effects could propel additional warming, emissions, and various feedback loops.
“These increased emissions from natural sources add to human emissions and amplify climate change,” says Phil Duffy, chief scientist at Spark Climate Solutions, who previously served as climate science advisor to President Joe Biden. “If you don’t consider all of them together, you can’t quantify the strength of that feedback effect.”
Other participants in the effort will include scientists at the Environmental Defense Fund, Stanford University, the Woodwell Climate Research Center, and other institutions in Europe and Australia, according to Spark Climate Solutions.
The nonprofit aims to publish the findings in time for their incorporation into the UN climate panel’s seventh major assessment report, currently underway, to help ensure that these dangers are more thoroughly represented. This, in turn, would provide nations with a more accurate understanding of the world’s carbon budgets, or the amount of greenhouse gases they can produce before the planet reaches temperatures of 1.5 °C or 2 °C above preindustrial levels.
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