Nord stream methane leaks won’t majorly affect climate, study finds

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The amount of methane that leaked out of the Nord Stream gas pipeline in 2022 is unlikely to have any detectable impact on the climate worldwide, the Finnish Meteorological Institute said Friday.

In September 2022, three of the four pipes making up the Nord Stream 1 and 2 undersea gas pipelines from Russia to Germany exploded. This caused methane to bubble up through the Baltic Sea and be released into the environment — triggering fears of environmental disaster.

On Friday, the Finnish Meteorological Institute said that while the amount of methane released — 330 kilotons, at their estimate — was “an outstanding amount” for a single accident, on a global scale it “hardly leads to any detectable consequences to the climate.”

At the time of the leaks, Jeffrey Kargel, a senior scientist at the Planetary Research Institute in Tucson, Arizona, told POLITICO that “the leak was really disturbing.” However, while the amount of gas lost “obviously is large… it is not the climate disaster one might think,” Kargel said.

Germany, Sweden and Denmark launched separate investigations into the incident. All three established it was due to a it was due to sabotage.

Several countries have been publicly blamed for the explosions, with varying degrees of evidence. Ukraine has said Russia was behind the bombing, and Poland has also hinted that Moscow was responsible, which the Kremlin has denied.

Earlier in March, German media reported` that German prosecutors have found “traces” of evidence indicating that Ukrainians may have been involved in the explosions that blew up the Nord Stream gas pipelines. However, those reports stressed that there’s no proof that Ukrainian authorities ordered the attack or were involved in it.

 An earlier report  by The New York Times had said that “intelligence suggests that a pro-Ukrainian group” sabotaged the pipelines.