Much of the heat at the climate conferences over carbon dioxide, but cuts to another greenhouse gas, methane, could give us the best chance of keeping the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees. Methane causes 80 times more warming than carbon dioxide, but it persists for just a decade, not centuries like CO2. So turning off the taps has a quick impact. Now, Skynews has been given exclusive data by the methane monitoring company, Kairos, which uses satellites to monitor non-natural sources of gas. So far this year, it has detected around 1,300 large emissions. This isn't from burning fossil fuels. It's methane leaks from drilling, mining pipelines, and landfill sites. Turkmanistan and Central Asia produce the most, followed by the United States, India, Russia, and Pakistan. The biggest single oil and gas source was on the Celican Peninsula in Turkmenistan, where a leak from one facility is estimated to have peaked at 333 tons an hour in August. The hourly rate is the equivalent to the carbon dioxide emissions from a car driving almost 38,000 miles. Coal is also a problem with one facility in Shanghai, China peaking at around 181 tons an hour last February. And some of the leaks are persistent.

A blowout at a well in Kazakhstan was pumping out between 21 and 56 tons of methane every hour for 153 days between June and November. 150 countries signed the Global methane pledge at the Glasgow Climate Conference to cut emissions by 30% by 2030, and they're expected to reveal how they'll do it at COP28 in Dubai. The US has just announced new rules forcing oil and gas companies to monitor for leaks and then plug them. It should cut emissions by 58 million tons between 2024 and 2038. According to the organizers of the Global methane pledge, if countries stick to their promises, it could reduce global warming by 0.2 degrees by 2050, preventing a quarter of a million premature deaths from extreme heat. There are few easy wins when it comes to climate change, but cutting methane really is a big deal.