Climate change is upon us.

It can be seen in melting Antarctic and mountain glaciers, multi-year long droughts in the North American West that spawn year after year of devastating wildfires, floods in Germany where this spring a year’s worth of rain fell in a few days and record heat seen across most of the northern hemisphere.

The risk side of this question is pretty clear. Simply put, while there is much less methane in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, it carries quite a global warming punch–roughly 28x that of CO2 over a 100-year timescale and 86x more over a 20 year one.

The opportunity comes from its shorter lifespan in our skies, approximately 12 years, vs carbon dioxide which can stay there for many hundreds of years. That means if we curtail the amount of methane going into the atmosphere now, it will have a significant impact in terms of reducing global warming in a relatively short time period. Before going into more detail on this, however, let’s get some of the basics established about methane.