Can someone please explain how this works?

Question

have been told that methane is many times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. Yet logic dictates that methane can only be a temporary molecule in the atmosphere. After all, if it built up the whole atmosphere would become flammable. Surely methane is destroyed relatively soon after its creation, by lightening for example ( I understand that there are hundreds of thunder storms every day some where on the earth) and leaves carbon dioxide and water. For years, NASA has been studying satellite data of the Amazon rain forest and have been unable to explain the large cloud of methane over the entire area. Recent research has now shown that tress produce methane in significant quantities and the breakdown of forest litter also produces some methane. Given this result and the supposed powerful greenhouse effect of methane, how did the earth survive before man's intervention when there were huge swathes of methane producing forests all over the planet, millions of farting, pooing and burping buffalo roaming the plains of North America and equal millions of farting, pooing and burping Wildebeest roaming in Africa as well as all the methane producing birds and other wild life? This planet must have smelt pretty bad!!!

Answer 1

While methane from animals is a significant problem, it just can't match thousands of gigantic power plants and hundreds of millions of cars putting out CO2.  Either now, or in history.

Answer 2

TO MAKE LIFE A LITTLE SIMPLIER FOR YOU TO UNDERSTAND. congress ordered the E.P.A. LAST YEAR TO PROVE THAT NON-SOLIDS WERE PENETRATING THE OZONE, BUT THEY COULD'NT, BECAUSE ALL NON-SOLIDS DECIPATE IN THE FRIGID THINNED AIR ABOVE. GLOBAL WARMING IS'NT CAUSED BY MAN OR ANYTHING FROM MAN.

Answer 3

The global warming myth is nothing more than anti-human and anti-technology.   It is a means of control.

Answer 4

Thank you Bob. Also, the methane content of the atmosphere is measured in parts per billion, this is too low to result in any large scale combustion from lightning.

Answer 5

Methane has a much shorter lifespan in the atmosphere than CO2. Once CO2 is released, it will continue to add warmth for centuries. This is why more concern is currently being expressed about CO2, but methane is still an important issue.

The combined methane emission rate (from forests, wetlands, buffalo, etc. and human activity) is significantly higher now than it has been for the past 10,000 (probably 600,000) years.  Human activity is responsible for about 60% of all methane emissions (natural and human combined).  So while forests do emit methane, it's small compared to human related activities.

Answer 6

In reality, much of the evidence of historical global climates are based on a number of measurements that require a good deal of speculative "interpretation". The IPCC climate change model has already been proven to be inaccurate, failing to predict the global temperature stability for the last 10 years. It also predicts a further warming of 0.3 c over the next 10 years when more recent research published in nature has indicated a lowering of temperature over the next 10 to 15 years due to a natural cyclical drop in sea temperatures around Europe and in the Atlantic. Reality is, if methane and the subsequent breakdown products, carbon dioxide in particular, are truly as powerful as predicted by the global warming mob the Earth would have cooked itself years ago. The fact that it didn't has raised all sorts of speculative bollocks and pseudo scientific smoke screens brought to you by the same people that brought you the Y2K bug, death by SARS and death by Bird Flu.

Answer 7

The planet was waiting for some people to come along and blame themselves for it all . So it could have a good laugh before it changed it all over again .