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Human-Caused Methane Emitted Today
+694 per minute · since 00:00 UTC
Estimated, not measured
Methane traps far more heat than CO₂ but leaves the atmosphere within about a decade. That makes it the only greenhouse gas where cutting emissions changes temperatures on a human timescale rather than a geological one.
Estimated tonnes of methane released since midnight UTC, from agriculture, fossil fuel extraction, landfill and waste.
Nobody counts this as it happens. EarthNow takes a published figure for the whole day, divides it by the 86,400 seconds in a day, and multiplies by the seconds elapsed since midnight UTC. So the value climbs smoothly and is the right order of magnitude — but the smoothness is arithmetic, not observation. Nothing happening in the world is being watched in real time.
value = daily total ÷ 86,400 × seconds since 00:00 UTC
A consequence worth knowing: the counter resets at midnight UTC, not at your midnight. And because every signal advances at a constant rate, this page cannot tell you whether today is unusual. For that you need a measurement.
~365 Mt of human-caused methane emissions per year.
The figure is theirs; the running total is ours. Cite them for the number, and EarthNow for what it looks like as it accumulates.
NOAA publishes a real measurement related to this signal: Atmospheric methane. It is an instrument reading with a date attached, not an estimate — and it is the number to cite.
Methane traps roughly 80 times more heat than CO₂ over its first 20 years in the air, but breaks down within about a decade — which makes cutting it the fastest available brake on warming.
See the measured reading →