The world has a real fight on its hands

Our planet will never cease to surprise us. Scientists have now found that warming temperatures can transform small natural ponds from absorbers of one type of greenhouse gas (carbon dioxide) into emitters of another (methane). The discovery may appear trivial, because small ponds cover only a tiny fraction of the Earth's surface. But consider the fact that ponds emit about 40 percent of the methane from inland water bodies.

The results of the seven-year study by British scientists have been published in the Nature Climate Change journal, and the researchers say both the trends cited in the study increased as global temperatures rise. That methane is about 28 times more effective in trapping the sun's radiation than CO2 makes the phenomenon especially devastating.

Five weeks before the scientists published the research results came a heartening, yet alarming, news - heartening because the British and the Congolese have discovered the largest tropical peatland (the size of England) that straddles the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Republic of the Congo, and alarming because draining it will release 30 billion metric tons of CO2, equivalent to greenhouse gases emitted by the United States in 20 years.