14 DAY TRIAL // The group of known threats to the environment has recently added two more previously ignored gaseous members. Although still far from the huge impact that carbon dioxide has as a greenhouse gas, the rising levels of methane and nitrogen trifluoride in the atmospheric air are fueling new concerns. Ron Prinn, an atmosphere expert from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Ray Weiss, a geochemistry professor at the Californian Scripps Institution of Oceanography, have performed more accurate studies and tried to estimate the future evolution of the amount of gases, as well as the real impact this will have on the global warming phenomenon.
Of them, methane seems to be far more unsettling from the point of view of atmospheric presence, as it determines the warming it can cause – about a third of that generated by CO2. A methane molecule has 20 times the heat trapping potency of a carbon dioxide one. This gas is mainly generated from plants in decay, landfills, animal residues, as well as coal and natural gas drilling. The rotting of plants in the Arctic Ocean is the most worrying source, since it has been going on for thousands of years, while the resulting billions of tons of methane have been trapped on the ocean floor, frozen in permafrost beds.
The warming of the ocean could release it on growing scales, rapidly filling the atmosphere with the heat trapping gas. The available data provided by constant 40-minute cycles of measurements indicate that the methane levels have started to increase again 2 years ago, following an 8-year long calm period. From June 2006 to October 2007, the quantity rose by 28 million tons, while it now reaches an atmospheric amount of 5.6 billion tons. As Prinn states, “if it's sustained, it's bad news,” adding that “whenever methane increases, you are accelerating climate change.”
As unlikely as it may seem, nitrogen trifluoride, a gas used for cleaning purposes in the manufacture process for TV or computer LCD screens, as well as for thin-film solar panels, although representing only 0.04% of the global warming impact of carbon dioxide, may yet prove to be a major reason for worldwide environmental concern. It is thousands of times better than CO2 at capturing heat, so that its increasing levels could alter the greenhouse effect exponentially. Recent research has showed that the quantity of nitrogen trifluoride in the atmosphere has increased 4 times in the last 10 years, and by a factor of 30 since 1978.