主题：【原创】对俄罗斯局势不负责任的预测 -- Swell

BERLIN — The two explosions in the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines in the Baltic Sea resulted in what could amount to the largest-ever single release of methane gas into the atmosphere, but it may not be enough to have a major effect on climate change, experts say.

While sudden influxes of methane from underwater pipelines are unusual and scientists have little precedent to fall back on, the consensus is that with so much methane spewing into the atmosphere from all around the globe, the several hundred thousand tons from the pipelines will not make a dramatic difference.

“It’s not trivial, but it’s a modest-sized U.S. city, something like that,” said Drew Shindell, a professor of earth science at Duke University. “There are so many sources all around the world. Any single event tends to be small. I think this tends to fall in that category.”

New data released Wednesday by the Danish Energy Agency allowed scientists to produce preliminary estimates of the amount of methane released. If all that gas reaches the atmosphere, it would be equivalent to about 0.1 percent of the estimated annual global methane emissions, according to scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey’s Gas Hydrates Project.

From an emissions perspective, the breach is “an important one to watch,” said Carolyn Ruppel, chief of the project, who made the estimate with a colleague, Bill Waite. A worst-case calculation by Thomas Lauvaux, a researcher with the Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences in France, equated it to what comes from about 1 million cars in a year — compared with the about 250 million cars operating in the European Union alone.