Oh, because one buzzkill wasn’t enough for you today, I figured that I’d go ahead and let you know that levels of methane, a greenhouse gas 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide, rose sharply last year for the first time in a decade. And the best part, the absolute clincher, is that scientists have no idea why that happened.

There is considerably less methane than carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Pre-industrial concentrations of methane were about 700 parts per billion — that is, for every billion molecules of air, there were only 700 of methane — but that level rose gradually to 1773 parts per billion by the late 20th century…The rise in 2007 was about 10 parts per billion over the course of a year, a real jump for such a short period of time.

Reuters reports that though methane levels have more than doubled since pre-industrial times (so let’s call that 125 years, give or take a decade), the levels had been pretty constant for some time. And they’re pretty well stumped about this new development.

Another surprise was that the rise in methane levels happened simultaneously at all the places scientists measured around the globe, instead of being centered near known sources of methane emissions in the Northern Hemisphere, said Rigby, one of the study’s lead authors along with Ronald Prinn, also of MIT.

So this is happening everywhere, and we don’t know why. Great. Of course, scientists also don’t know whether this is the start of a trend or a one-off anomaly. Apparently these scientists don’t know too much, which somewhat concerns me that we let them also collide atoms.

takepart to learn how to reduce your greenhouse gas emissions. We can’t do too much about methane, but the other stuff you may be able to control a little bit.