Turning one greenhouse gas into another could combat climate change

Sucking methane from the air might deliver a bigger bang for the buck than just removing carbon dioxide, reports James Temple.

The case: While carbon dioxide is the notorious villain of climate change, methane is more potent. Although we produce less of it, it traps 84 times more heat during the first two decades.

A proposal: By developing systems to capture a few billion tons of methane from the atmosphere, we could reduce short-term warming much more than we would by removing far more carbon dioxide, a paper in Nature Sustainability suggests.

Specifically: They suggest using zeolites, minerals with tiny pores. Removing 3.2 billion tons of methane would reverse one-sixth of the total warming effect of all greenhouses gases in the atmosphere, the study found. Crucially, this all assumes that the methane would be converted into carbon dioxide and released again. Read the full story here.