{"id":29819,"date":"2018-01-17T11:11:54","date_gmt":"2018-01-17T16:11:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=29819"},"modified":"2018-01-17T11:14:49","modified_gmt":"2018-01-17T16:14:49","slug":"new-nasa-study-solves-climate-mystery-confirms-methane-spike-tied-to-oil-and-gas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=29819","title":{"rendered":"New NASA Study Solves Climate Mystery, Confirms Methane Spike Tied to Oil and Gas"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 id=\"page-title\" class=\"page__title title\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.desmogblog.com\/2018\/01\/16\/nasa-study-resolves-climate-mystery-confirms-methane-spike-ties-oil-gas\">New NASA Study Solves Climate Mystery, Confirms Methane Spike Tied to Oil and Gas<\/a><\/h3>\n<article class=\"node-12536 node node-blog node-promoted view-mode-full clearfix\">\n<div class=\"field field-name-field-bimage field-type-image field-label-hidden\">\n<div class=\"field-items\">\n<div class=\"field-item even\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.desmogblog.com\/sites\/beta.desmogblog.com\/files\/styles\/full_width_blog_image\/public\/blogimages\/burn_map.gif?itok=BrkVY0-A\" alt=\"Global map of percent changes in acres burning\" width=\"826\" height=\"465\" \/><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"new-horizontal-social-bar clearfix\">\n<div class=\"new-horizontal-share-wrapper new-horizontal-email-wrapper clearfix last\"><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden\">\n<div class=\"field-items\">\n<div class=\"field-item even\">\n<p>Over the past few years, natural gas <a href=\"https:\/\/www.eia.gov\/todayinenergy\/detail.php?id=25392\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">has become<\/a> the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.powermag.com\/the-future-looks-bright-for-natural-gas-fired-power-generation-but-price-volatility-is-a-wild-card\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">primary fuel<\/a> that America uses to generate electricity, displacing the long-time king of fossil fuels, coal. In 2019, more than a third of America&#8217;s electrical supply will come from natural gas, with coal falling to a second-ranked 28 percent, the Energy Information Administration <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/news\/energy-environment\/wp\/2018\/01\/09\/its-the-same-story-under-trump-as-under-obama-coal-is-losing-out-to-natural-gas\/?utm_term=.3ba01dc474ec\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">predicted<\/a> this month, marking the growing ascendency of gas in the American power\u00a0market.<\/p>\n<p>But new peer-reviewed research adds to the growing evidence that the shift from coal to gas isn&#8217;t necessarily good news for the\u00a0climate.<\/p>\n<p>A team led by scientists at <span class=\"caps\">NASA<\/span>&#8216;s Jet Propulsion Laboratory confirmed that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41467-017-02246-0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the oil and gas industry is responsible for the largest share of the world&#8217;s rising methane emissions<\/a>, which are a major factor in climate change \u2014 and in the process the researchers resolved one of the mysteries that has plagued climate scientists over the past several\u00a0years.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Missing\u00a0Methane<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>That mystery? Since 2006, methane emissions have been rising by about 25 teragrams (a unit of weight so large that <span class=\"caps\">NASA<\/span>notes you&#8217;d need over 200,000 elephants to equal one teragram) every year. But when different researchers sought to pinpoint the sources of that methane, they ran into a\u00a0problem.<\/p>\n<p>If you added the growing amounts of methane pollution from oil and gas to the rising amount of methane measured from other sources, like microbes in wetlands and marshes, the totals came out too high \u2014 exceeding the levels actually measured in the atmosphere. The numbers didn&#8217;t add\u00a0up.<\/p>\n<p>It turns out, there was a third factor at play, one whose role was underestimated, <span class=\"caps\">NASA<\/span>&#8216;s new paper concludes, after reviewing satellite data, ground-level measurements, and chemical analyses of the emissions from different\u00a0sources.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>New NASA Study Solves Climate Mystery, Confirms Methane Spike Tied to Oil and Gas Over the past few years, natural gas has become the primary fuel that America uses to generate electricity, displacing the long-time king of fossil fuels, coal. In 2019, more than a third of America&#8217;s electrical supply will come from natural gas, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[147,5317,251,7411,267,328,5316,929,554,1729,11167],"class_list":["post-29819","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","category-environment","tag-coal","tag-desmog-blog","tag-eia","tag-electricity-generation","tag-energy-information-administration","tag-fossil-fuels","tag-methane","tag-nasa","tag-natural-gas","tag-oil-and-gas-industry","tag-sharon-kelly"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29819","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29819"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29819\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29820,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29819\/revisions\/29820"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29819"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29819"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29819"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}