Stunning drone footage captures Chasm 1, a huge crack on the Brunt Ice Shelf. When it inevitably intersects with the nearby Halloween Crack, an iceberg the size of Houston, Texas will break off into the ocean.
Exceptional heat records are happening more frequently due to climate change, and scientists in California are concerned that an iconic species of trees will not survive. The iconic CBS News’ Danya Bacchus reports from Joshua Tree National Park.
The climate forcing from methane emissions since pre-industrial times has been 60% of that from CO2, meaning that methane has made a large contribution to observed warming over the past century. However, the climate impact of methane emissions is very different than that of CO2 emissions in terms of time scales, and this must be recognized when setting climate policy targets: use of a single climate metric to compare the effects of methane and CO2 emissions is not appropriate. An additional complication is that methane is emitted by a variety of sources, and there is large uncertainty in the contribution of different source regions and sectors to the overall methane budget. The recent decadal uptick in methane has generated much interest and is still unexplained. Satellites offer considerable potential for global monitoring of methane emissions, quantifying the contributions from different sources, detecting temporal variability, and attributing long-term trends. Atmospheric methane has been measured continuously from space since 2003, and new instruments have been recently launched or are planned for launch in the near future that will greatly expand the capabilities of space-based observations. I will discuss the value of these observations to better quantify and monitor methane emissions, from the global scale down to the scale of point sources.
