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Sure the number jumped, but how much is 15 parts per billion worth?

Your persistence is appreciated.

For those following along this thread the annual peak should be this reporting date, typically in September or October. These are obviously new highs but as always Methane is complicated because it A) Has a much stronger impact on GHG insulating effects and B) has a relatively short atmospheric lifetime. If we can get our act together and stop leaking so much methane into the atmosphere from man made sources the numbers would be expected to level off and return to a normal rather than increasing format.

Tanada wrote:If we can get our act together and stop leaking so much methane into the atmosphere from man made sources the numbers would be expected to level off

With Russian built Gas pipelines going in all over Europe? Gas is part of the big transition away from GW emissions. It reminds me of the Montreal Protocol where they successfully eliminated Ozone depleting CFC gases from refrigerants and underarm sprays by replacing them with nasty HFCs.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 110737.htm

Another piece of the puzzle. Sulfur hexafluoride (SF6)
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/10/sulfur- ... top-using/

theluckycountry wrote:

Tanada wrote:If we can get our act together and stop leaking so much methane into the atmosphere from man made sources the numbers would be expected to level off

With Russian built Gas pipelines going in all over Europe? Gas is part of the big transition away from GW emissions. It reminds me of the Montreal Protocol where they successfully eliminated Ozone depleting CFC gases from refrigerants and underarm sprays by replacing them with nasty HFCs.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 110737.htm

Another piece of the puzzle. Sulfur hexafluoride (SF6)
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/10/sulfur- ... top-using/

In this case We means the human species, after all we all live on the same planet and a Cock up by one is paid for by all. I am not overly worried about Russian pipelines, in general they funded the construction but the local governments have to inspect and approve them so it is not a case of slap dash Soviet era construction passing because the chief inspector is on the take and drunk as well.

Tanada wrote:

This graph shows the infamous "hiatus" about which the deniers were bleating so hard. But it is basically an illusion. There was a surge of warming going into the 1990s that then slowed down. But the underlying trend has been upward and there was no cooling trend which would require the temperatures to go back down to early 1980s levels. The Arctic is thawing and the methane (and CO2) is coming out. The reservoir of carbon in the permafrost is huge.

https://nsidc.org/cryosphere/frozenground/methane.html

There is a huge amount of carbon stored in permafrost. Right now, the Earth's atmosphere contains about 850 gigatons of carbon. (A gigaton is one billion tons—about the weight of one hundred thousand school buses). We estimate that there are about 1,400 gigatons of carbon frozen in permafrost. So the carbon frozen in permafrost is greater than the amount of carbon that is already in the atmosphere today. That doesn't mean that all of the carbon will decay and end up in the atmosphere.

But that is not the whole story:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12541-7

we place total oceanic CH4 emissions between 6–12TgCH4yr−1, narrowing the range adopted by recent atmospheric budgets (5–25TgCH4yr−1) by a factor of three. The global flux is dominated by shallow near-shore environments, where CH4 released from the seafloor can escape to the atmosphere before oxidation. In the open ocean, our models reveal a significant relationship between ∆CH4 and primary production that is consistent with hypothesized pathways of in situ methane production during organic matter cycling.

So 9 Gt of CH4 per year which is bloody substantial compared to the amount of CH4 in the atmosphere (scale it by the mixing ratio against CO2 and then again by the molecular weight). It is oxidation by OH in the troposphere and photolysis in the stratosphere that limits CH4. But the emissions are not marginal and the Arctic shelf permafrost source is enormous. We are likely to see much higher CH4 spikes in the future. Since the IR absorption of CH4 is about 70 times that of CO2 this is big deal. The radiative transfer effect will be concentrated in the northern hemisphere and towards high latitudes reflecting the mixdown of these emissions.

The fun is only getting started.