Mitigating Methane Growth to Contain Global Warming

Our meeting of the month, Saturday, January 11h 10:00 am will feature a presentation by Dr. Manvendra Dubey, Fellow, Los Alamos National Laboratory. He will review the current state of methane emissions problem and what might be done.

Abstract
Methane (CH4) is the 2nd most important anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) that has contributed 0.5 C to the observed warming since the pre-industrial times. It is short lived with a ~decade lifetime ~80 times more potent a GHG than the long-lived carbon dioxide that lasts for centuries. Therefore, reducing CH4 will slow warming in the short term. Furthermore, CH4 is a valuable commodity. The U.S. Global Methane Pledge promised 30 percent reduction in CH4 emissions by 2030, a big step towards stabilizing climate. Methane’s annual increase, following a pause in the early 2000s, has accelerated breaking records in 2020 and 2021, underscoring challenges to achieve and verify the pledge. The methane cycle is complex with large emissions from fossil fuels, food production and landfills, as well as natural wetlands. These are expected to increase with climate change and humanity’s growing energy and food needs. Methane levels are sensitive to the hydroxyl radical that is the sink for methane. I will highlight exponential advances in observations and inverse modeling to constrain CH4 sources at local, regional, and global scales to make measurable reductions. Modern leak detection and repair technologies have matured to identify and curtail fugitive emissions from the vast fossil sector and meet stringent regulatory requirements. Advanced dairy management, such as the use of microbial digesters in dairies to capture and use biogas for energy is feasible. The convergence of public and private sectors, economic incentives, technical innovations and verifiable regulations, the consumers and producers, and multiple agencies to scale current technologies and is a source of optimism to reduce humanity’s CH4 emissions this decade. Progress on this path needs to be sustained to contain global warming to manageable levels.

Bio

Dr. Manvendra Dubey is a Laboratory Fellow at LANL. His PhD at Harvard and postdoc at SRI-International elucidated radical-molecule reaction mechanisms to predict stratospheric ozone deletion by halocarbons and supersonic transport. Dubey integrates laboratory and field measurements to refine climate-change assessment models. He has performed targeted greenhouse gas and aerosol observations to verify emission inventories and validate parameterizations. He demonstrated that smoke from fires plays a key role in climate. He helped isolate the human climate signal from natural variability, showing that the Arctic is warming faster than the globe. Dubey discovered the Four Corners methane hot spot and has developed satellite methods to verify greenhouse gas emissions. He is an AAAS and Fulbright Fellow. He gave the 2023 Keeling lecture and won the 2019 and 2022 R&D100 awards.

Join via zoom