April 23, 2009

Good Methane Burps

Liam M. Higgins

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We’ve been hearing for a while how warming temperatures might release huge burps from methane deposits on the seafloor and from permafrost—frozen reservoirs known as clathrates.

This is not something we want. Methane is 20 times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. In the last 150 years it’s more than doubled in the atmosphere until today it totals about half the greenhouse effect caused by carbon.

The good news is that the latest belch 11,600 years ago appears to have been caused by expanding wetlands not melting methane ice. This according to a Scripps Institution of Oceanography study measuring carbon-14 isotopes in methane from air bubbles trapped in glacial ice. They found the surge 11 millennia ago was more chemically consistent with an expansion of wetlands. The paper’s in Science.

Wetlands profusely produce methane as bacteria breakdown organic matter. Wetlands also tend to spread during warming periods.

Not this one though. We’re destroying coastal and inland wetlands faster than any other ecosystem on Earth, according to the 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment.

So we’re killing off the methane factories. But also the biodiversity factories, the water filtration factories, the storm-buffer factories. Wetlands provide ecosystem services estimated at $14 trillion a year.

Sigh. Burp.
 

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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