DISCOVER MAGAZINE - Methane is an extremely potent greenhouse gas, capable of trapping more than 80 times as much heat as carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. Indeed, it is thought that between 20 and 30 percent of global warming since 1750 can be pinned on methane emissions alone, and agriculture is one of the biggest culprits.
But it is possible to capture and cleanse methane before turning it into a product that can be reused, as one family farm in California has shown. The implementation of dairy digesters could reduce methane emissions by approximately 80 percent, say climate researchers writing in Global Change Biology Bioenergy.
“When the system is built well and managed carefully, the emissions really drop. That’s what we saw here,” lead author Francesca Hopkins, a climate scientist at the University of California, Riverside, said in a press release.