| HappySqurriel said: This is a problem though, as long as we focus on CO2 we will never see the big picture ... We know that methane is about 22.5 times as potent of a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide, and we have recently learned that worms produce a gas which is 290 times as potent of a greenhose gas as carbon dioxide. The last statistic I heard was that bugs like worms and termites outweighed humans, and with how potent this gas is a very small quantity of gas produced per worm could have a massive impact. |
I don't know what that gas is, but I think it's safe to assume that the level of that gas has been balanced for a long time because the biomass of it's producers is pretty much constant. CO2's danger lies in its long atmospheric residence time of about 200 years, whereas methane 'only' has about 20 year life expectancy. To my knowledge, the more exotic greenhouse gases have even shorter residence times as they are more unstable.
