Global warming: Increasing methane emissions threatens the Paris Agreement ‘ambitions’

World News Adina Camarasu
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Agriculture, along with the livestock industry, contributes with almost two-thirds of methane emissions caused by human influence.

The gas concentrations have a strong greenhouse effect and have registered a rapid growing, reaching an unimaginable level over the last two decades.

An international team of scientists published this study on Monday in the Environmental Research Letters journal, a day before starting the American Reunion of Geophysics in San Francisco, as AFP informed.

Scientists warned these concentrations of methane began to rise sharply around 2007 and accentuated in 2014 and 2015.

The levels of gas have increased by at least 10 billion times a year, an obvious difference when compared to the early 2000s, when methane concentrations grew on average by 0.5 parts per billion annually.

The reason behind this sharp increase is not yet known and scientists argue that we need to give extra attention to methane, for it has a powerful greenhouse effect that can hinder the fight against global warming.

‘The rising tendency in terms of methane emissions should be taken seriously’, says Stefan Schwietzke, expert of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – NOAA.

The study published on Monday summarizes the research of 81 scientists from 15 countries.

With an increase of just 1 degree Celsius above the level of pre-industrial eras, the world is facing extreme weather conditions, including droughts, super storms, heat waves and floods due to the rising sea levels and oceans.

Given the current global conditions, the average temperatures will tend to increase by at least 3 degrees Celsius until 2100.

Maintaining the temperature increase below 2 degrees Celsius is a difficult target, underlined the researchers referring to Paris Agreement.

This was the first international climate agreement, dedicated to limiting global warming, adopted on December 12, 2015, that entered into force last month.