A few years ago during a visit to Berkeley, CA I saw a man sleeping on the sidewalk. On his chest was a piece of cardboard on which he had written "We are all fucked." I said to myself that he must be the only man in Berkeley who knows what is going on. Speaking of knowing what is going on, Harvard researchers have found that with all our focus on lowering CO2 levels, we have ignored the increase in the even more dangerous gas, methane (CH4). "Between 2002 and 2014, the data showed that US methane emissions increased by more than 30 percent, accounting for 30 to 60 percent of an enormous spike in methane in the entire planet’s atmosphere." If those figures frighten you, and they should, you also now know what is going on and...we are indeed all fucked. The US is massively leaking methane from its gas infrastructure and there may be no way to stop or reverse the phenomenon.   It may also be too late. 

"The EPA insisted this wasn’t happening, that methane was on the decline just like CO2. But it turns out, as some scientists have been insisting for years, the EPA was wrong. Really wrong. This error is the rough equivalent of the New York Stock Exchange announcing tomorrow that the Dow Jones isn’t really at 17,000: Its computer program has been making a mistake, and your index fund actually stands at 11,000.

These leaks are big enough to wipe out a large share of the gains from the Obama administration’s work on climate change—all those closed coal mines and fuel-efficient cars. In fact, it’s even possible that America’s contribution to global warming increased during the Obama years. The methane story is utterly at odds with what we’ve been telling ourselves, not to mention what we’ve been telling the rest of the planet. It undercuts the promises we made at the climate talks in Paris. It’s a disaster—and one that seems set to spread."

The article from which this quote came is entitled Global Warming’s Terrifying New Chemistry by Bill McKibben.  It appeared here in the March 2016 of the Nation.