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+702 per minute · since 00:00 UTC
This is a live, continuously changing estimate. It isn't printed here because a figure on paper would be wrong the moment you read it — see the current value at https://earthnow.app/signal/human-caused-methane-emitted-today.
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 the figure advances at a constant rate, this page cannot tell you whether today is unusual. For that you need a measurement.
369 Mt of methane a year from direct human sources — fossil fuels, agriculture and waste, and biomass burning — averaged over 2010–2019.
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. It measures a related quantity, not this counter's own: cite it for what it measures, and never as a measured value of the figure above.
The concentration is the stock these emissions feed, together with sources this counter leaves out, such as wetlands and inland waters. Chemistry in the air breaks methane down, so the concentration rises only while more is added, from every source, than is removed.
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.
—ppb
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