If you could easily cure diabetes would you? What if the planet had diabetes and you could cure that too?

I just worked it out. Methane is a sugar rush for the atmosphere.

From the ice core (courtesy NASA’s James Hansen):

Remember Gore’s “hockey stick graph” for carbon? Well you should see methane’s. It’s basically a vertical line (above). From 1900 to 2000 the atmosphere’s methane concentration rose faster and faster. There are reports of a leveling off towards the end of the 20th century – but this occurred at a crazily dangerous level. The atmosphere contains three times more methane than ever recorded (we can see back 800,000 years).

Methane doesn’t last long, comparatively. But it works hard. It’s seriously worrying that there’s enough methane being emitted to keep the atmospheric concentration rising exponentially despite the short lifespan.

Carbon on the other hand is a long lasting and slow working gas – it’s to be expected that carbon would rise and continue to rise.

But methane so far has been seriously underestimated.

What sugar does

Besides nutrients and fiber, food breaks down to glucose – sugar, energy. You’ve got low GI foods and you’ve got fast carbs (white rice, bread) then there’s pure sugar – straight to the blood as there’s little to break down. Our bodies can deal with a certain amount by releasing insulin into the bloodstream or exercising more to work off the energy.

If you have too much sugar the blood becomes saturated and you throw the system off balance. This can be fatal. Uncontrolled high blood sugar leads to heart disease, blindness and kidney disease. Consistently high blood sugar also leads to diabetes: the body stops producing insulin which regulates blood sugar. 

What methane does

Carbon lasts for thousands of years in the atmosphere. It is our low GI, long term greenhouse gas. Methane, the atmosphere’s white sugar, lasts for less than ten years, warming intensively at first. Over twenty years it averages to 72 times the warming potential of carbon (still not a productive way to measure it but it’s a lot more realistic than 25).

The atmosphere is experiencing blood sugar overkill and is developing diabetes. Hydroxyl (the insulin of the atmosphere), the radical that oxidizes methane, is in short supply.

Good news: cutting livestock products out of out is healthy, affordable and immediately possible. A new analysis from World Bank colleagues sates that livestock account for at least half of human greenhouse gas emissions.

Oh – and plant-based diets are the best prevention and cure for human diabetes too. Funny that.

Start with the red meats, then the whites, then diary. Or just do it all at once. But don’t waste time, we haven’t got much.

Take a look at the graph above again and think about it.