Impact of a global warming on biospheric sources of methane and its climatic consequences

Most of atmospheric methane originates by bacterial processes in anaerobic environments within the soil which are found to become more productive with increases in ambient temperature. A warming of climate, due to increasing levels of industrial gases resulting from fossil fuel burning, is thus likely to increase methane abundance within the atmosphere. This may lead to further heating of the atmosphere, since both methane and ozone (which is generated in the troposphere from reactions of methane) have greenhouse effects. We have explored this feedback mechanism using a coupled climate-chemical model of the troposphere, by calculating the impact of the predicted global warming due to iricreased emissions of carbon dioxide and other industrial gases on the biospheric sources of methane. Although we find this climate feedback to be, by itself, relatively minor, it can produce measurable increases in atmospheric CH₄, concentration, a quantity which should additionally increase as a consequence of increasing anthropogenic emissions of CO and CH₄, itself. It would thus seem useful to carefully monitor future atmospheric CH₄, concentrations