The Greenhouse Gas to Beat

Methane is odorless, colorless and invisible to the naked eye. It’s also one of the most damaging greenhouse gases impacting climate change.

Colorado State University biology professor Joe von Fischer researches how humans, plants, soil and soil microbes influence greenhouse gas emissions, including methane.

Methane, as von Fischer says, may be a big key to getting climate change under control.

“The reason is that if you release a pound of CO2 into the atmosphere, it’s going to go up and spend about 100 years there. But methane, in contrast, only spends on average of about 10 years in the atmosphere,” explains von Fischer.

“It spends less time in the atmosphere, meaning that if we cut off our methane emissions, we could reduce the concentration in the atmosphere rapidly and give ourselves a little bit more time to manage CO2, which is a more complicated gas.”

Von Fischer has studied methane since he was in graduate school, and he affectionately refers to it as his favorite gas.

His research has taken him from the lab to experiments around the U.S. including a collaboration with Google to add methane detectors on Google Street View cars.

“We’ve worked to analyze that data, and we found that methane emissions from the natural gas infrastructure are really common in cities,” said von Fischer.

“We found that there is on the order of 700,000 natural gas leaks in the U.S. at any given moment.”

This research has given von Fischer a new role, as well, as the “friendly neighborhood scientist.”

“One of the cool things about being at a land-grant university like CSU is part of my job is to be the friendly neighborhood scientist. It’s about outreach. It’s about connecting with people where the science that we do is directly relevant.”