Greenhouse gases is a term which is thrown around a lot in
today media and in most cases people just assume that when this is said people
are talking about CO2 but this isn’t the case. Hopefully you’ll know a bit more
about greenhouse gases by the end of this post.- So the exact definition of a greenhouse gas is – a gas that contributes to the greenhouse effect by absorbing infrared radiation. So basically for a gas to be a greenhouse gas it just needs to capture heat and prevent it from leaving earth’s atmosphere. There are countless different greenhouse gases from the well-known ones such as carbon dioxide (CO2) and Methane (CH4) to water vapour (H20) and even ozone (O3) so it’s important to remember without ozone, water and several of the other greenhouse gases we wouldn’t be able to inhabit the earth.
- Methane has a global warming effect far greater than that of carbon dioxide! The exact figure varies across different sources of information but an article published in Scientific America in 2015 put the number at 86x greater than carbon dioxide. Methane has a greater effect due to its differences from carbon dioxide means that it is capable of absorbing different frequencies of infrared radiation and so it collects energy which would have ordinarily passed through the layers of carbon dioxide. This is because a methane molecule contains 4 C-H bonds while carbon dioxide has 2 C=O bonds and it is these bonds which absorb different frequencies of infrared radiation. So as the number of methane molecules increases the amount of this energy being absorbed will increase until it reaches a saturation level so that is why methane has a higher effect as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide as an individual molecule as there are fewer of them as they have a larger amount of infrared radiation to absorb, but overall carbon dioxide as a sum total possess a greater effect currently on the global climate.
- Carrying on with the theme of methane the sources of it may surprise you of the main sources of this gas. The main contributor which many people might know of is from domestic live stock or more primarily cattle. Apart from that however there is a large amount of methane produced in rice production which creates 31 million tonnes annually. As well as other human derived methods of methane creation such as biofuels and waste decomposition there are already huge stores of it held in certain areas of the world. These are known as clathrates and are found either in areas of high pressure (ocean floors) or in permafrost’s the problem with these stores however is they are slowly releasing the methane they are storing. This is a never ending circle as well, as when the gas is released the climate increases and the process speeds up. This at some point soon is going to reach a certain stage a line is going to be cross and a methane belch will occur which will be irrevocable. Can you think of any other sources of methane gas?
Thanks for reading!
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