Title: Can methane oxidising bacteria reduce global warming? A modelling study

Authors: Ashish Goyal; J.B. Shukla

Addresses: School of Mathematics & Statistics, UNSW, Sydney, NSW, Australia ' BIT, BIIFR&D, Bhabha Group of Institutions, Kanpur (Rural), India

Abstract: Global warming is an important environmental problem caused by gases such as carbon dioxide (CO₂), methane (CH₄), etc. Specially the emission of methane is difficult to control at source, but its concentration in the atmosphere can be controlled by a bacteria which consume methane for its survival and existence. Methane oxidising bacteria (MOB) decreases the concentration of methane in the atmosphere but increases the concentration of CO₂. However, it can still assist in reducing the overall effect of global warming by these two gases since CO₂ has less detrimental effect than CH₄ on the environment. The role of MOB in controlling global warming and to what extent is very speculative. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a nonlinear model to investigate this. The model analysis showed that with the help of MOB, the rise in mean atmospheric temperature will be 0.22°C less in the next 100 years compared to the rise in mean atmospheric temperature without MOB.

Keywords: methane oxidising bacteria; methane; temperature; mathematical model.

DOI: 10.1504/IJGW.2018.091948

International Journal of Global Warming, 2018 Vol.15 No.1, pp.82 - 97

Received: 07 Jun 2016
Accepted: 01 Jan 2017
Published online: 22 May 2018 *

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