Mysterious methane surge since 2020 was “90% due to microbes”

Written by Jo Nova on October 29, 2024. Posted in Current News

Wouldn’t you know it — 150 nations signed the Global Methane Pledge without even bothering to check if the methane was man-made

Methane — the second most hated ‘greenhouse gas’ — spiked to record historic levels in the last few years, over 1,900 parts per billion.

In 2019, even the World Economic Forum ‘scientists’ admitted they couldn’t explain the baffling rise, and then in 2020, the world of methane went into the twilight zone.

We shut down the modern world due to the ‘pandemic’, and methane levels rose even faster.

It seems many have been blaming ‘fossil fuels’ for the global surge in emissions, but forgot to check the C13 isotopes. Somehow we spend millions on breathalysing cows, measuring their burps, and feeding them seaweed, but didn’t think to do the basic chemistry.

How could that be, you might wonder… 158 nations agreed to cut methane emissions by 30 percent by 2030, but none of them audited the science even though very strange things were happening.

(The point was obviously the “pledge”, the junkets, the captive industries and subsidies, anything but the actual science).

Methane from ‘fossil fuels’ has a higher carbon-13 ratio, but even though ‘fossil fuel’ use was rising, the carbon-13 levels of atmospheric methane was going down.

Indeed this new study shows it’s been falling for 17 years.

It’s not like this snuck up on us….  any inquiring mind should have seen this coming a decade ago. The lab has been recording C13 in methane since 1998 and gets air samples from 22 sites around the world every week or two.

From the press release:

Microbes in environment drove methane emissions more than fossil fuels between 2020 and 2022, analysis finds

They found that between 2020 and 2022, the drastic increase in atmospheric methane was driven almost entirely by microbial sources. Since 2007, scientists have observed microbes playing a significant role in methane emissions, but their contribution has surged to over 90 percent starting in 2020.

“Some prior studies have suggested that human activities, especially fossil fuels, were the primary source of methane growth in recent years,” said Xin (Lindsay) Lan…

“These studies failed to look at the isotope profile of methane…

They go on to mention that in a warmer world, bacteria have a higher metabolism, which means they are happier and work faster. Thus, if the world warms for any reason at all, methane will rise — and there is nothing we can do about it.

The one last straw they could clutch is that maybe the microbes were “man-made” :

It remains unclear whether the increased microbial emissions came from natural sources like wetlands or human-driven sources, such as landfills and agriculture.

The team plans to delve deeper to identify the exact source of methane.

As if somehow there was a surge in landfill, rice paddies or cows in the last few years that no one had noticed.

This is a pretty big deal — methane has supposedly caused about 30% of our current temperature rise (say the broken climate models) yet 90 percent of that recent rise was microbes.

It’s yet another slice of the climate we aren’t controlling, but we’re still designing burgers with mealworms and bacon from fungus, in the hope of reducing methane emissions and controlling the weather.

Then it turns out every swamp and square meter of soil is working against us.

Methane concentrations in the air have almost tripled since the 1700s, but that was the Little Ice Age.  It’s easy to believe that as the world warmed up, the planet’s wetlands and soil microbes have just been returning to normal business for the last 300 years.

We skeptics told the experts long ago it was mostly not man-made, Tom Quirk showed that methane rises and falls in time with El Ninos, and was thus largely a natural phenomenon.

Willie Soon also pointed out that one of Saturn’s moons has more methane than all the oil and gas deposits on Earth, but has no dinosaurs, cows or leaky wells.

REFERENCE

Michel, Sylvia Englund, et al (2024) Rapid shift in methane carbon isotopes suggests microbial emissions drove record high atmospheric methane growth in 2020–2022, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2411212121

See more here joannenova.com

Some bold emphasis added

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